Oil Head

Richard Godwin

Oil head, snake-skin, all them things.

An’ more.

I like the slow grease that comes off them. Though a snake’s drier’n a kettle drum.

I wipe the grease onto my rag and bend down low into them engines, fixin’ their parts, getting their cars to work, an I do ’m good, that’s the general consensus round here.

I can make a razor whistle in the breeze behind my garage when the sun’s goin down, and I can fix your engine for you in no time, ma’am.

She brought it up one hot evening when all I wanted to do was shower.

I’d been fixin’ Jim’s Buick an’ done a good job.

Only garage round here for miles.

I got a reputation.

I hear an engine pull up an I know from the rattlin’ sound it’s work.

I know everyone’s engine noise round here and I knew this was a stranger.

As I looked up, I saw her legs first. Then out she got, in that dress that just shimmered in the late summer heat.

“ ‘Scuse me,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I seem to be lost, an’ my engine’s rattlin’ something awful. Would you have a look at it? I’ll pay cash.”

It was a Trans Am, an’ she looked good in it.

I knew there was nothing wrong with it other than the gasket an’ need of an oil change, but I told her she’d have to wait while I looked it over.

She sat on my stool, an’ I checked her engine while she chatted.

“Where am I?”

“This here place is called Switchville, ma’am.”

“Is that right?”

“Most folk ain’t heard of it.”

“It is a little off the beaten track.”

“You could say that. Mind if I ask where you’re headin’?”

“Just drivin’,” she said, an’ I figured no one knew where she was.

She had no wedding ring, but was a good-lookin’ lady. Expensive clothes, never worked hard in her life.

“I’ll need to keep it overnight.”

By now the sun was going down, settin’ hard and fast in them deep hills, and the dogs’d start to barkin’ soon.

She didn’t look surprised, just a little scared and said:

“Is there no way you could fix it for me?”

I wiped my hands on my rag and looked at her.

“What’s the hurry?”

“I need to be somewhere.”

“It’s a big job.”

“I can pay whatever you’re askin.’ ”

So I figured what was the difference, anyway, and set the highest price I ever have.

She didn’t bat an eyelid, and so I said:

“Ma’am, that’s an awful lot of cash.”

“You don’t believe me? I’ll give you some now,” she said, and going into the trunk of her car, fetched out a bag and gave me half.

I could see her bag bulge with what was more of it an’ I figured I was onto a good thing.

She turned and sat back on my stool, her figure all tight in her dress an’ I started on the job.

“It’ll take a while ma’am. You’ll be leavin’ in the dark.”

“Anywhere I can get something to eat round here?”

“Well, there’s Jim’s place.”

“Where’s that?”

“Two mile up the road.”

“Two miles? I can’t walk that in these shoes.”

She flashed one of them at me an’ a good dose of leg an’ thigh while she was at it.

“I’ll take you, he can bring you back.”

I put her in his Buick and set off.

“You don’t believe in locking up your garage?”

“No point.”

I noticed she kept her bag with her.

Jim opened after a bit of banging and said he’d fix the lady something an’ bring her back.

She looked around at the tables and rickety chairs.

“What kind of place is this?” she said.

She wasn’t the first to make that comment, an’ won’t be the last.

Jim ignored her and started rustling up his stew. It works every time.

I fixed her gasket and changed her oil an’ showered an’ changed an’ drank some beer an’ had a good supper an’ waited till she came back.

It was late when I heard Jim’s tires shred the dust outside.

He pulled her out, her head lolling on one side.

“All yours, Oil Head,” he said. “Stew’s done it.”

An’ he screeched off.

I took her out back an’ she started to come round. That’s how I like it.

She saw me going through her bag an’ getting my money. There was a hell of a lot more.

“What are you doin’?” she said, all groggy an irritable.

“Just getting my pay, ma’am.”

“Give me that.”

She made a swipe for the bag.

“Your car’s fixed, but I don’t think you’ll be goin’ anywhere.”

“Oh yeah, why’s that?”

“You gonna drive like that?”

“Like what?”

An’ she staggered an stumbled all over the place.

“What kind of a hick place is this anyway? I ain’t seen no houses, only you an’ that other fella.”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

An’ she gave me a look I really didn’t like.

“What were you expectin’?”

“You hicks.”

“Got our own way of doin’ things out here in Switchville.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure is.”

The dogs were barking in the hills now and she turned at the noise.

“I’m leavin’.”

“You sure about that?”

An’ I grabbed her an’ her little bitty dress and pulled it right off her and watched her expression change all slow to anger and shock and then she started to run, but I caught her an’ got hold of her and down there on the floor with all the oil stains and the grease an, bits of used car engine, I lay on top of her, an’ she screamed till the dogs went howlin’ way into the night an’ them dogs must have raised a noise you could hear for miles an’ then she stopped.

“You fuckin’ grease monkey,” she said.

“Well, what’s wrong with a little grease, ma’am? It’s what makes you work down there, oils you up for my pistons,” an’ I gave her ass a little slap.

Then I whipped out my razor and cut her up an’ gave her the treatment.

She screamed real loud when I started turnin’ her to jar.

I had ’em all lined up, my pretty jars.

“No one’ll hear you,” I said, “only Jim.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna pickle you, ma’am.”

“You fuckin’ hick bastard.”

I cut her up real good, ’cause we don’t take no disrespect here.

An’ I cut her in hunks, and settled her down real sweet into my oils, an’ she sat there in them jars pretty as a picture.

Jim just loved it.

We sold her car, an’ got good money for it.

I pickled her well, her rich body, and I tell you it smells even better now with my treatment on it than when I first whipped that dress off her ass. She was out of her way and askin’ for it, that’s what Jim said.

She’s in oil.

Her engine parts winkin’ inside them jars.

Most folk don’t understand the value of grease.

Oil’s good an’ll slick a situation up real fine.

She suits oil, good-lookin’ lady like that.

An the oil’ll keep her lookin’ real good.

Shopping Addict

Richard Godwin

She wore a new scent every day.

She loved to peel fruit with a scalpel.

They sat at the small table in the corner of the restaurant and she sparkled like cut glass.

Gracie found it hard to sit down in the skin tight dress and now she sipped her cocktail nervously.

She could see Bobby getting angry at the waiter.

“Where’s our fucking food?” he said.

She stirred her drink with her fingernail and licked the drops from its tip.

Then she looked at him. She knew the kind of mood he was in.

She raised a heel and ran her stiletto across his crotch and felt him stirring.

“Let’s eat,” she said.

“Then what?”

“What you think?”

“How much did those shoes cost?”

“550.”

“Dollars?”

“They’re Sergio Rossi.”

“I put that in his pocket. What did he just do, suck my dick?”

“That’s my job, baby.”

The waiter came then and he ate quickly and stared at her as she took her time.

Gracie looked as though she had just stepped out of the shower. Her hair was immaculate and her skin perfect but when she looked at the waiter as Bobby paid, there was some resident malice in her glance as if she blamed him for ending the lunch.

Every time he looked at her, she smiled sweetly and when he looked away, a veil would fall across her face and some unreadable look pass over her.

“You know what you is?” Bobby said.

“Pretty?”

“Sure, any man’d fuck you. Somethin’ else.”

“Now let me see.”

She propped a finger beneath her chin.

“You’s a shopping addict.”

“A what?”

“I’m serious, I seen it on a chat show.”

“Oh, Bobby.”

“Addictions are a deadly serious matter, Gracie. One woman became so hooked, she started killing people.”

“Killing and shopping don’t have nothing to do with one another, that’s stupid.”

“Addictions lead to other addictions. Ain’t you never heard that?”

“No.”

“It’s true, they merge and you may start out buying clothes and end up in a dirty rotten business you had no intention of getting into in the first place.”

Bobby clicked his fingers and the bill arrived. He laid out a stack of bills then got up.

“Where you going?” Gracie said.

“I’m gonna shake the piss from my dick then we’s gonna hump,” he said.

She watched him walk away.

A small beetle crawled across the starched white table cloth and Gracie pressed it beneath her polished fingernail, crushing the hard shell of its body and trailing as much of it as she could into the linen.

When Bobby came back, she said “I think I’ll change from Zoya.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking ’bout, but it don’t mean shit to me.”

“I’m talking ’bout my nail polish.”

“Only time I look at your hand baby is when you’s rubbin’ my dick.”

She did not want to go back to the apartment but she did and lay there as Bobby entered her.

Over his shoulder she counted the bags on the table and thought of shopping.

“You got great tits,” Bobby said as he lay there.

Gracie went into the shower and washed him off her, rubbing perfumed oils into her full breasts and thighs before coming out naked and watching him get aroused again.

“Baby, I need some clothes.”

“All right all right,” he said, getting up. “How much?”

“A thousand.”

“Fuck me, a thousand, you fucking bitch, you better make it worth it.”

“What do you want?”

She reached for his crotch.

“You like that baby?” she said.

“Come on, get on the bed.”

“I just washed.”

“An’ you wanna go shopping.”

“You like me looking all pretty.”

“I like you best with no clothes on, an’ that don’t cost nothing.”

“You like them heels.”

“I tell you what I want.”

“Sure, honey, anything.”

“I want you to bring some women back and we can screw ’em together.”

“Bobby.”

“I’ll pay an’ you can buy as many fancy fuckin’ dresses and bags as you like, then you can come back and fuck me.”

“I don’t like other women.”

“How about your girlfriends?”

“I don’t trust ’em.”

“They’s good for a jump.”

“They ain’t like me, Bobby. Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

“You should see ’em without their clothes. Mary, she’s got this hairy old snatch, ain’t shaved it in ages.”

“Don’t mind a bush.”

“I thought you liked me like this.”

“Looks like a mustache.”

“Bobby.”

“I’ll double what you want if you bring two of your friends back.”

“Any two?”

“So long as they’re fit.”

“All my friends are fit, I don’t hang out with dogs.”

“No shit.”

“Double, you say?”

“Sure thing.”

“I need some cash now.”

“I need some snatch now.”

“Come over tonight.”

“You got it.”

He administered a slap to her backside and walked out of the door.

Gracie looked at herself in the mirror.

She felt dissatisfied.

The need for acquisition hungered inside her like a crack addict coming down.

She got on the phone.

By the end of the afternoon she’d rounded up two friends.

And the old headache returned.

She hadn’t had it since high school when she used to argue with Susy. Perfect Susy all the boys wanted. What a bitch. Anyway, she was dead.

Tamsin and Jacky were cool.

Bobby would screw them and forget about them.

Gracie could show off her wardrobe to them.

She began to feel better.

She went out to buy some drinks and on her way back tripped on a dog tied to a post.

“Fuckin’ stupid prick, look what you did,” she said, inspecting her snagged heel.

She took her shoes off and hit the dog with the good one.

Then she went home and washed.

She put on her best Gucci dress and newest stilettos and stood in front of the mirror.

She did not feel any better as the doorbell rang.

She let Tamsin and Jacky in and looked with fury at their dresses.

“Herve Leger?” she said to Tamsin.

“Yeah.”

“Like my Marc Jacobs?” Jacky said.

“Very nice.”

Gracie went through to the bathroom where she downed four painkillers and drank whisky neat from a bottle of whisky she removed from the cabinet. Then she fixed them all a Cocksucking Cowboy.

They sat and waited for Bobby to arrive.

“So he’ll pay well, your fella?” Tamsin said.

“Bobby’s got money, sure,” Gracie said.

“Why else would you be with him, right?” Jacky said.

“He’s all right.”

“All right in the wallet, huh, Gracie?”

She stirred her Cowboy with her finger.

“Straight fuck?” Tamsin said.

“Yeah.”

As Tamsin crossed her legs, Gracie could see she wasn’t wearing any panties.

She got up and made them another drink, pouring more Schnapps in this time.

As she watched Jacky sip hers, the bell rang.

Bobby introduced himself and sat down and joined them.

“You sure look good, ladies”, he said. “Whatcha drinkin?”

“A Cocksucking Cowboy,” Tamsin said.

“Well I ain’t joinin’ ya. Mine’s a whisky straight up. The only kind of cock’ n’ tail you’ll see from me, is my fine dick up your snatch.”

Gracie went to the toilet and when she returned, she saw Bobby enter Tamsin.

She looked at her naked butt and compared herself.

Then she waited as Jacky stripped and as they worked Bobby, she looked though their bags.

When they were finished, they sat naked and asked for more drinks.

“I just need to get something from the kitchen,” Gracie said.

“What?” Bobby said.

“A secret ingredient.”

She went and made them their Cowboys, fetching something out of the cupboard. Then she washed her hands, patting them dry with a towel. She brought them their glasses. And sat and watched them.

Bobby was admiring Jacky, and Gracie said, “Do you like her more than me?”

“No, baby, but she sure has got a good snatch on her.”

“And I don’t?” Tamsin said.

“You, too, baby, you too.”

“I’m gonna take a shower, then I need to go,” Jacky said. “You got the money?”

“Sure have,” Bobby said.

She went to wash but when she came back, instead of dressing, she sat on the sofa.

“You look tired,” Gracie said.

“I am,” Jacky said.

“I must have shagged you ladies out,” Bobby said, getting up and fixing himself a drink.

Jacky’s head dropped forwards and Tamsin slumped next to her on the sofa.

“Now ain’t that a picture?” he said, looking at them. “Naked as the day they were born.”

“Bobby?” Gracie said.

“Yes, baby?”

“You prefer me to them?”

“Course I do.”

“Can I have more money? It ain’t enough.”

“Now I told you what we agreed.”

“But there’s a dress I want, you’ll love me in it.”

“No.”

“I need to stand out from the crowd.”

“All you need to do to stand out from the crowd is stand butt naked in that good skin of yours an’ let ’em see your snatch.”

He walked through to the bathroom and slammed the door.

Gracie stood there and listened to the shower run.

She looked at Tamsin’s dress lying on the floor, then Jacky’s.

She held them to her face, feeling the texture.

She ran her hand along her sleeping friends’ bodies. She got the iron out of the cupboard and put it on.

Then she went to the kitchen.

Jacky screamed once, and Tamsin didn’t stir.

Gracie looked as if she was stroking them. She peeled their skin away with great dexterity, removing two sheets of flesh which she held up to the light.

When Bobby came out of the shower, he stood there and said “Fuck, baby what you done?”

“I’m gonna make a dress, Bobby.”

“With their skin?”

“Don’t you think it’ll look pretty?”

“They’s open wounds Gracie, you peeled ’em raw.”

“It don’t matter.”

“You’s gone, baby, we need to get their bodies out of here.”

“I need to put on my dress first.”

“I always said one day snatch’d land me in trouble.”

“Pass me those scissors, Bobby.”

He looked at the butchered women and at Gracie.

She was laying out their skin on the coffee table and smoothing the creases with the iron.

Trinket

Richard Godwin

The sun is dying on the terrace

As the leaves decay

On our

Abandoned lawn

And I watch my

Marriage fall apart

I tinker with the wreck of

An old car

That lies at the edge of a field.

It will never see the road.

My wife,

In name only,

Informs me she has taken

A lover.

“To hell?” I ask.

She looks away,

I look with disinterest

At her veiled cyanic eyes

And try to find the shape

Of the love I once knew.

She shops.

She looks absurd.

And I mock her.

She knows no end to vanity.

She always was a

Simple child

Doted on by

Deluded parents.

And then one day,

In a house full of packed boxes

I find

A trinket.

I see her walk away

Along the drive

With some part

Of my soul in her overburdened heart.

“Trinket,” by Richard Godwin. Originally appeared in Asphodel Madness 2.0 on October 4, 2010.

Snowstorm in Compass Land

Richard Godwin

There are

no correspondences

in the tangled bedding of your dreams

did you think it would be that easy?

Cogent correlation

reassuring allusion

smug conceit of reference and allegory

are all

Pedagogic semen, a snowstorm in the heat of summer,

fragments of ice in the climax

useless as a dry sea eroded and bereft of fish

stinking with some tide of useless senseless deprivation and decay

So play the dark rose of threnody and beat the split drum

your malodorous melody tilts on its axis of sound

while you whittle away the dry bone of memory

in the empty parlor whose precise monotonous

Metronome of despair has caught your sullen glances

in its tarnished mirror and shows all too well

that the cake has gone

it tasted of thickened icing and bitter fruit

Such as the spendthrift waiter threw away last winter

when you decided to take up waltzing

like your camera frozen maiden aunts

but they are no more a reference point than

The insurance policy you bought from the con man

at the bank

or your static husband

or mirror lazy children

THE DENTIST

Richard Godwin

Joshua Stone ran a profitable practice. He had small hands which the women liked because they were easy to get in their mouths.

He wore a light cologne and played innocuous music to mask the sound of the drill.

“I may not seem it but I am surprisingly strong,” he said to his wife Susy early on in their marriage.

Susy used his wealth to buy expensive clothes and seduce men while he was at work.

When his business partner retired he carried on at the practice on his own.

He also hired a private detective to find out what his wife was up to when he noticed some anomalous transactions on her credit card.

The Palm Hotel had cropped up a few times and he wanted to know what she was doing there.

The detective returned with some photographs of Susy with two different men. In one of them she had her hand on a guy’s lap, in the other she was kissing a man with a grey moustache.

Joshua Stone was a calm, controlled man who showed no hint of emotion when he returned the evening he found out.

Nor did he let on he knew the first man in the photographs, a client named Adam Little.

He said nothing to Susy who was making a Martini as he came in; he ate supper and went to bed.

He lay there, smiling in the dark, because his first appointment the next day was with Adam Little.

He had cancelled all his others.

He got up early the following morning and went straight to work.

He prepared his finest drills and when Adam Little arrived, he greeted him and waited while he got in the chair.

Then he leaned him back further than usual.

“How is it all feeling?” he said, prodding around in Adam’s mouth.

“Un-nh.”

“Yes, I see you have some decay here, I’ll have to perform an extraction.”

“Oh-rh?”

Adam Little stared up at the masked face haloed by the light and thought he caught a glint in Joshua’s face.

“Relax,” Joshua said, and injected him with water.

He turned on his drill, pausing with it by Adam’s ear.

“I’m going to have to dig deep,” he said.

He drilled straight into a nerve and chuckled as Adam screamed.

Then he wrenched a tooth out.

“Rotten,” he said, throwing it across the room.

He drilled through the side of Adam’s face and, holding him down, he pulled his teeth out one by one, snapping them off at the roots. He had him by the throat as he finished the job.

“Rinse,” he said, letting him up, and handing Adam a towel to stem the bleeding.

Adam stood up and staggered to the door. He tried to speak but his mouth wasn’t working.

“That’ll be two thousand,” Joshua said and began laughing.

As Adam walked to his car with a mouth dripping with blood, Joshua gave himself a huge shot of Novocaine.

Then he returned home where Susy was preparing to meet a lover.

“My dear, I’ve been looking at your teeth and I need to do some dental work on you,” Joshua said.

The Plumber

by Richard Godwin

He sat at the back of the caf, egg dripping from his stained spoon, greased mobile clenched in his hand.

“Na, fuck off, I ain’t doin’ that.”

He laid his mobile down and bit hard into the two slices of toast wedged together with plastic egg, yolk squirting out of the sides and landing on the front cover of the Sun which read:

“THIS COUNTRY’S GONE LOONEY!”

He was six foot and overweight, and he ignored the trainee who was looking bored and staring out of the window at two teenage girls who were laughing at something.

The plumber looked at his trainee and followed the line of his eyes.

“Fuckin’ slags,” he said.

“Why d’you ’ave to say that ,’Arry? They ain’t.”

“Look at them. Arses hanging out, beer bellies, dear, oh dear, whatever ’appened to decency, they look like a couple of scrubbers.”

“They’s just young women, ’Arry.”

“Na. You wanna get yourself a nice girl, Mick.”

Mick stirred his cold tea with disinterest and yawned while Harry flicked open the Sun.

“Now look at that,” Harry said.

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference?”

“Between them girls there and them out there?”

“They’re fuckin models, you prat. Class paper, this,” Harry said, leafing through its pages. “ ’Ere, these geezers go out for a Ruby right, get slaughtered and one of ’em moons the waiter. ’Is mate bites his arse and gets his false teeth stuck up ’is crack. Fucking classic.”

Soon they left and headed to the first job.

Mick was pale skinned and in the sunshine looked like a blank sheet ready to be imprinted by Harry. He wore a look of permanent dissatisfaction and looked too clean for the van, which was strewn with litter. Here and there were signs that he was trying to blend in with Harry. His trousers were overly dirty and he had a large rip in his T-shirt that looked manufactured. He was unshaven and the resulting effect of this was a small wispy beard.

Harry didn’t stop talking all the way to the job and Mick stared from time to time at Harry’s hands, which were covered in tattoos.

“So what we doing, ’Arry?” he said.

“Blocked drain in Wandsworth.”

“It’s always blocked drains or toilets.”

“No it ain’t, two fucking minutes on the job and he thinks he knows it all. Mick, I’ve seen things I could put in a novel doing this game, it’d be a bestseller, I can tell ya.”

“Like what?”

“I know all sorts, all fucking sorts.”

“Yeah?”

“I tell ya, one night I ’ad to fix some loos in a nightclub in London. The ladies toilets were overflowing with piss and water, like a fucking swimming pool they were.”

“An’ why was that?”

“OK. I goes in there and wade through it all in me wellies.”

“Right.”

“I can tell right away it’s this one loo, bunged up it was, something terrible.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I fuckin’ fixed it, you burke.”

“Na, I mean—”

“I know what you mean, Mick. I get me old plunger out but nothing’s ’appening, know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“So I rod down, deep down in there, and in this job, me old son, you gotta get your ’ands dirty, that’s what I always say to the fucking smartarses who mouth off about ’ow much plumbers charge. ’Ow much fu-cking plumbers charge! You stick your arms in someone else’s shit every day and you’d fucking charge, you cunt.”

“So what ’appened?”

“I tell you, my old lady ’as two washing machines, cause we’re posh. If I stuck me workclothes in the one she washes the kids’ clothes in, they’d be covered in shit, know what I’m saying?”

“What d’you find in the toilet?”

“I stick me arm in and fish out a pair of knickers.”

“Knickers?”

“Yeah, some old tart had crapped ’erself an’ flushed them down the loo.”

“Ah, that’s fuckin’ disgusting.”

“All part of the job, me old man. Get out of the way, you cunt.”

Harry leant out of the window and spat a large gob of phlegm that looked like a piece of potato. It arced and landed on the offending driver’s windscreen.

“Yeah, well, I don’t plan on doing this for long,” Mick said.

“Oh, yeah, what you got planned, running for Parliament?”

“No need for that.”

“I tell you, me old son, I seen some things. You learn a lot about human nature on this job and you get an insight into crime.”

“Crime?”

“You know how many wallets I’ve fished out of loos?”

“Na.”

“ ’Undreds, fucking ’undreds, mate. Pickpockets steal ’em, knick the contents an’ flush ’em.”

“Fuckin’ stupid, if you ask me.”

“Well, I ain’t askin’ you, I’m telling ya. This is like sociology, this job, you see what people are made of, what they’re about and it ain’t just the low life, it’s the posh ones too.”

“You charge ’em more?”

“Course I fuckin’ charge ’em more, the cunts. They look down their noses at people like us and we go into their ’ouses and fix their shit for ’em. Tell you what, Mick, I was called to this job once in ’Amstead, big fuckin’ gaff, massive and the loos were all flooded and I took one look at the slag who opened the door and I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“It was ’er.”

“What was ’er?”

“I’ll tell ya. She ’ad guilt written all over ’er face. You see, I know ’ow loos work and what goes where and I know when someone’s lyin’, I’ve heard all the lies under the sun and it’s made me a bit of a psychologist, see.”

“So what ’appened on this job?”

“What ’appened was, all the loos were bunged up with condoms, ’undreds of the fuckers.”

“So?”

“The lady, she’s wafting around in a negligee, showing a bit ’ere and there, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah?”

“Good looker she was, but a slag. Anyway, when I tell ’er about the condoms, she starts adjusting ’er belt and flashes ’er gash at me, just a little glimpse and then she looks me right in the eye and says, don’t tell my husband.”

“She was screwing someone else.”

“Course she fucking was. ’Er old man’s doddering about in the next room writing a check, and ’e’s a bout a ’undred and she’s not bad ,as I said.”

“Did she?”

“Did she what?”

“You know.”

“Fuck off. I’m a ’appily-married man.”

“So what did you do?”

“I fu-cking overcharged ’em so much, it paid for me missus’s Range Rover.”

“Look at that.”

Mick was staring at some scantily-dressed women who were walking across the road.

Harry took one look at them and said, “You’d catch something nasty off them.”

“ ’Ow d’you know?”

“I fuckin’ know, me old son.”

“I think they’re tasty.”

“You wouldn’t know tasty if it sucked your knob.”

“Why’s it always loos?”

“It ain’t, there’s sinks and boilers, cockstops and drains, external soil pipes with shit running down ’em and all sorts of pipe work. Son, you’re in the right game. Fuck off, you wanker!”

This last comment was aimed at a man who was loitering in front of Harry’s van.

He put two fingers up at Harry who hurled his half-drunk can of Red Bull at him, spraying him with its contents.

“That’s a waste,” Mick said.

“I ’ate fuckin’ cunts like that. Where was I? You see, this is an old trade and what you want , Mick, is a trade. We’s got words that go back to Chaucer.”

“ ’Oo?”

“Chaucer, ain’t you never ’eard of ’im?”

“No.”

“’E wrote plays. There’s something we call a bastard in this game, and it was used in ’is day, fourteenth century.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The cunts in Europe want us to change our terms cause they ain’t fuckin’ politically correct. They say they demean women.”

“Why do they say that?”

“’Cause they want to get rid of our Englishness.” He tapped the George flag that was stuck to the roof of his van. “Still flyin’.”

“Ever seen something really gruesome?”

“Oh, yeah. I could be a copper, I could, with what I’ve seen and they need fellas like me.”

“’Ow come?”

“’Cause I can tell if a crime’s been committed.”

“What crimes you seen?”

“Mainly theft. But I tell you, it’s only a matter of time.”

He pulled over and parked outside a large white house.

“This it?” Mick said.

Harry nodded.

“I seen tampons, sanitary towels, rags, and clothes stuck where they shouldn’t be but one time I ’ad me ’and down a drain and I felt all this hair.”

“Hair?”

“Hair, me old son.”

“What was it?”

“I tell ya, Mick, I thought it was a fuckin’ ’ead. I was pullin’ on it, wondering what state of decay it would be in.”

“Was it an ’ead, ’Arry?”

“The ’ouse belonged to some pop star, ’e ’ad this long ’air, see?”

“Yeah.”

“ ’E ’d been washing ’is ’air and it ’ad all gone down the plug ’ole and accumulated into this big thick ball. I fished it out and it was huge.”

Mick was laughing when they got out of the van.

A pile of puke was hardening in the morning sun and two empty beer bottles were propped against the gate to the house.

“This shouldn’t take long,” Harry said.

He rang and they were admitted by a maid in a starched white uniform who led them through to the back where a drain was overflowing.

“Typical, she never even offered us a cup of tea,” Harry said, as he assembled his rods.

“ ’Ere, give us a hand.”

He prodded for an hour or so and the water level didn’t drop.

The owner came out, a man in a pinstriped suit, looking sweaty. He offered them tea and the maid brought it to them on a tray.

“That’s better,” Harry said.

Mick looked down at the drain.

“What now?”

“We get in.”

He donned his Wellingtons and waterproofs and stood waist high in the water. He reached a hand down into it.

“There’s something in the way there. I can feel it.”

He fetched the jet hose from the van and started up the pump and after an hour the water had dropped.

Harry stood in it again while Mick watched.

“I tell you, this job shows you a lot, Mick,” he said. “You see what people really get up to.”

Harry reached his hand down into the water and started to pull on something.

“There are a lot of crazy fuckers in London and a lot of crime. This is a tough fucker I tell you, ’ere it goes, it’s coming, fuck me!”

Harry stood with a head in his hand.

The flesh of the neck had sealed off and was a whitish blue and the discoloration of the face was so grotesque, Mick started to retch.

Harry stood there, staring at it.

“Call the fucking police.”

He placed it on the ground and clambered out of the water.

The head lay like a rotten wound in the sun.

Soon the stench of it overpowered the smell of excrement and stagnant water.

Mick stood at the edge of the garden, looking away.

“I told you this job was full of surprises,” Harry said.

The police took a while arriving and when the owner saw what had been blocking up his drain, he vomited on the flagstones in the yard.

It sprayed remnants of food and bile everywhere ,and the sharp smell rose into the air and foundered on the rank aroma of decay.

When the police arrived, Harry said, “Let me do the talking.”

Christmas Stuffing

by Richard Godwin

As a white dusting of snow covered the street outside, Marsha Bland finished applying lipstick to her plump lips.

Marsha loved Christmas.

She called it the time of giving and would spend hours preparing her husband Tom’s favorite dishes.

She ordered the best Norfolk turkeys, which she stuffed with relish, pulling out the giblets with her bare hands which she liked to wipe on the front of her apron.

She was immaculately fussy about hygiene but the sight of the intestines on her front was a secret turn-on.

Her arousal was augmented by the sherry she drank while cooking, as Tom would relax in the living room watching TV.

He loved her Christmas stuffing, describing it as “An orgasm in the mouth.”

She made it herself, using a secret recipe which she refused to share with anyone.

It was true her stuffing was delicious, a fact testified to by all her guests.

They would have the Malcolms round every Christmas, get drunk and she would flirt with Jack while Tom eyed Patti’s buxom figure.

Marsha said cooking was her therapy.

After the breakdown, when she found Tom in bed with his secretary, she took Prozac, but one day said, “I don’t feel I’m me anymore,” and stopped.

She found herself one sunny afternoon with a pair of scissors in her hand. She had the blades on either side of Tom’s favorite suit, the one he’d worn the day she found him with his secretary.

That moment was like coming out of a dream and Marsha wondered how she’d got there.

She left the bedroom, replaced the scissors in the kitchen drawer and promptly started cooking, soothed by the sound of sizzling in the skillets.

She forgave Tom, who swore he would never stray again, and she analyzed her failings, finding it easier to blame herself for his infidelity.

She concluded she had not been a good wife, and began to cook lavish meals for him every night.

She always liked to add a little something extra to her dishes.

That year, as snow covered London like icing sugar, she played her favorite Christmas songs and began to make preparations for their lunch.

The Malcolms were coming.

It was just them this year.

The absence of children in Marsha’s life was an occasional itch she would scratch with food.

She felt so long as she fed Tom, she had him, and never questioned whether he would stray again.

She wanted to fatten him up like a plump little duck and she would occasionally get frustrated by Tom’s lack of weight gain, a by-product, he said, of his frequent visits to the gym.

That Christmas Eve, Marsha stood dressing in front of the long mirror in their bedroom.

She’d just got back from visiting her sister and was ready for the cooking the next two days would entail.

She looked at her full figure and knew she was an attractive woman.

Her evening dress hung from a knob on the cupboard and she put on a pair of running pants and an old sweatshirt.

She looked at herself and screamed, “Cunt!”

Then she went downstairs to her car.

She put a toolbox in the boot and started the engine.

A few miles away, Mary Hart was getting out of the bath.

She rubbed oils into her skin and put on a deep red dress.

She looked at herself with satisfaction and puckered her lips, pressing a Kleenex between them as she applied burgundy lipstick.

She was an attractive brunette with a look of used decadence in her eyes.

As she stepped into the hall outside her flat, she was hit with a heavy object and landed on the carpet. Marsha found Mary’s keys in her handbag and dragged her back into the flat where she proceeded to strip her.

As Mary came to, she stared up at Marsha’s obsessed face and screamed.

She quickly found a gloved hand over her mouth.

Marsha straddled her and held her down with one hand. In her other hand she held a long filleting knife.

“Listen, bitch,” she said, “you don’t fuck my husband.”

Mary was trying to speak and Marsha released her grip.

“I haven’t slept with him.”

“I saw it all on CCTV, you fucking him in the Jacuzzi.”

“Get out.”

Mary was struggling and kicked Marsha, knocking her off balance.

Mary got to her feet.

“Get out of here before I kill you.”

“You kill me? Look at you.”

“Yeah, look at me. I’m everything you’re not. You know what Tom likes the best about me? My tits. He loves coming inside me, he loves fucking me.”

“Does he?” Marsha said with a coldness that stalled Mary.

She rose slowly and penetrated Mary’s stomach with the knife. The sound of flesh and silk tearing merged as blood ejaculated from the wound and Mary clutched her stomach.

And Marsha stabbed her in the chest, the knife lodging and vibrating there like a tuning fork.

She could see Mary’s intestines through the wound and she watched Mary’s hands drip with blood.

She waited for Mary to die and when she lay still, she stood over her, knife in hand.

“ ‘Mary, the bitch,’ I used to call you, Mary with the tits and nothing else, you advertise your cunt for any passing man. If you fuck my husband, there is a price to pay and you are about to pay it. I knew you were after him the first time I saw you cross the room to speak to him. There’ll be no more room crossings for you now.”

She took one last look at Mary and removed her breasts. Then she pulled a plastic bag from her pocket and placed them in it. She put this in the hold-all she had with her.

She left the flat, returned home, and showered.

Then she drove to Mr. Gravinge before he shut.

Carols were playing in the shop and she felt high.

Mr. Gravinge was behind the counter and greeted her with his usual warmth.

“My dear Marsha, how delightful you look this year, I can tell you have something special planned.”

“Mr. Gravinge, I do, how astute you are.”

She selected her ingredients and placed these on the counter.

“Stuffing?” Mr. Gravinge said.

“My stuffing,” Marsha said.

“Have a wonderful Christmas.”

“You, too.”

She walked round the counter and kissed him on the cheek, leaving him beaming as she left the shop and drove home.

Tom was drinking a whisky when she got in.

She said little to him and spent the evening preparing everything for the next day.

Then she passed a dreamless night and awoke at dawn.

She spent all morning cooking and was in the kitchen when the doorbell chimed.

She came into the hallway smoothing her dress as Tom greeted the Malcolms.

“Jack, Patti,” he said, shaking hands and kissing Patti on the cheek.

Marsha watched as he did this, making sure it was her cheek not her mouth.

She took them through to the living room and made them drinks.

“Smells good,” Jack said.

“I have a little treat for you this year,” Marsha said.

“Something different?” Jack said.

“It’s a surprise.”

She left them and went into the kitchen with her glass of wine, closing the door.

She removed the turkey and fetched the plastic bag from the cupboard.

Mary’s tits stared at her like candied cherries on a pink blomange.

She poured some of her blood from the bag and basted the turkey with it.

Then she cut Mary’s breasts into strips that resembled bacon rashers and placed these on the bird.

She diced the rest, including the nipples, and added these to her stuffing which she inserted into the turkey with vigor.

She poured the rest of the blood into the baking tray and put it back in the oven.

Then she joined the others.

A few hours later, merrily drunk, they sat down to eat.

Tom carved, rubbing the knife against the fork and looking with relish at the bacon.

He stuck the knife in the turkey. It reminded Marsha of the filleting knife as it vibrated in Mary’s chest.

“You always remember,” he said.

“That you like your rashers,” Marsha said.

“These look particularly tasty.”

“I know what you like, Tom.”

“Sounds like the Dunmow Flitch,” Jack said.

“What, as in the bacon awarded by the village of Dunmow to the couple that had stayed together for the year?” Patti said.

“That’s it,” Jack said.

Marsha tittered as Tom carved.

“Jack, what’s your pleasure?” he said.

“Leg.”

“All the more breast for me,” Tom said.

“You like your breast, don’t you, Tom?” Marsha said, “Dig deep into the stuffing.”

Their plates were covered with meat and a richly red gravy which circled what remained of Mary’s tits. The meat was thick and chewy and they ate every morsel.

Afterwards, Jack sat back with a satisfied look and said, “That stuffing is incredible. It’s the best stuffing I’ve ever tasted.”

“What do you put in it?” Patti said.

“It’s a secret,” Marsha said.

Tom sat picking at a bit of meat that had lodged itself in his teeth.

“She never tells anyone,” he said, extracting a small pink filament and inspecting it before popping it back in his mouth.

They returned to the living room and had more drinks.

Marsha felt happy and played her favorite Christmas music.

The Malcolms left at about eleven and Marsha turned to Tom in the hallway as he shut the door and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

“Good idea,” he said.

Upstairs, he watched Marsha undress and get in bed next to him.

“I’m a lucky man,” he said, touching her breasts. “I have a great wife who cooks the most amazing food.”

Marsha leaned towards him.

She pulled down her top.

“Tom, do you want to know what’s in my stuffing?”

The Man in the T-Shirt

Richard Godwin

At night I drive through the city. The road sounds like a broken bone beneath my wheels, I am driving over broken bones, the skulls and skeletons of all the dead, gone in the war and buried like dogs alone at night or in the daytime that brings no sunlight now, just a wound in the skyline.

I look down on the city of dreaming lights from my hotel window.

It is past midnight and I stand on the twenty-fourth floor.

The streets coil like an electric snake around the houses and the lights stretch all the way to the edge of the horizon.

Below me the river flows with some freezing frequency against the electric heat and charge.

The city bristles with deceit and crime.

I can taste it.

The freeway buzzes with a hive of cars like bees released and hungry for nectar.

The nectar these drivers seek are hookers they visit on their way from work.

They stop at sports clubs to shower the women’s flesh from them before donning virtue like a worn hat.

There is no hush.

I watch these men and women who use nighttime to do the things they do.

I see a car stop in the road below me.

Through the reinforced glass of my window and at this height the man who gets out is less real than an actor on the TV I do not put on.

I am tired of the same dish it serves me.

I want new excitement.

He stands in the middle of the road and starts yelling.

A blonde woman in a fur coat gets out.

It is not yet cold enough for fur, although the signs of winter are in the air daily as I walk the block to fetch the newspaper I throw away after a brief glance.

There is no news.

The woman is saying something to the man. I am not part of this. I cannot hear what she is saying. I can make out she is attractive and angry.

He hits her. He spins and hits her not with the back of his hand but his fist.

Her head flies back and she knocks it on the car. She slumps to the ground and he picks her up, hauls her into the car and drives away. I wonder what this is about. I am powerless to intervene.

I am merely a spectator.

I consider if I have become a voyeur.

The truth is I am what the hotel has made me.

It is the structure of the building and its height that causes me to behave in this way.

I look beyond what has just happened.

It is not real.

The lights of some offices blink at me in the sky.

The buildings have taken over with their grim prophecy of our exile.

We are set apart, made remote from experience. Who’d have thought that architecture would finally spell our ruin? In our attempts to house more and more people we have breached the purity of sky and alienated ourselves from one another. We ride the hungry streets searching for the things that make us carry on. Sex and money fuel us.

We are part of their design. They have designed us. They have shaped our world and warped our perceptions. Truth has become a dubious spectacle. They have been doing it for years. Eroding our souls with concrete and steel.

At night they numb us. They heighten our threshold of pain until there is no sensation.

In a disused parking lot a man kicks a beer bottle.

He gets on his cell phone and walks away.

Two young women walk arm-in-arm singing, they are drunk, they stagger in their high heels and look vulnerable. I wonder if they will be attacked by a predator.

A light comes on in a building. I fetch my binoculars and hone in. They are high-powered and make the blurred shapes come into sharp focus. I see a man stand at a window. He is playing with something. He is young, well built and wears a T-shirt. It is black and he turns towards the window. His T-shirt has a logo on it that looks like a bull. Yes, it is a bull.

He seems to be saying something and I imagine he is talking to himself.

He walks away from the window, into the room, and I follow him.

As he moves I see a man and a woman in there.

They are naked and tied to chairs.

The woman is staring with horror at the man in the T-shirt.

She is tied with ropes and they are cutting into her breasts.

She is trying to say something.

The man is tied as well, the binds tight against his genitals.

I think of turkeys trussed up. There is the melody of an abattoir that drifts into the static space of this spectacle, a melody with no music, just the staccato rhythm of noise jarring against a structure, like a needle on a bone.

The man in the T-shirt hits the woman across the side of the head.

She spits out a tooth. Her mouth runs with thick blood.

I realize they are not playing a game.

She is screaming now, pulling forward on her binds and trying to escape like an animal.

The man in the T-shirt shoots the man in the chair.

He slumps forward, all resistance gone, a relic.

I wonder if I am giving reality to this scene.

I want to help.

The man in the T-shirt shoots the woman and leaves the room.

The word violation floats before me. Its sense seems to have been removed, it is like an eggshell with the small dead fetus of a bird inside it.

I watch, my binoculars trained on the building as if it might give them life.

I stand looking at them.

They do not move.

I look at the city.

I rest.

There is none to be had here.

The hotel has no guests.

I can hear movements in the walls, the structure is being eroded from within.

They have infiltrated the structure of our lives with overload.

They have invaded us like tiny parasitic worms that crawl beneath the surface of our skin and eat our food within our bellies. That explains the hunger, the constant gnawing need.

We have been impregnated by some nameless nocturnal rapist. The deformity inside us is leeching our nutrition from us.

All part of the political program. The body politic has swollen like a tumor. Our alienation is complete. They have sealed us off like vacuum-packed food.

It is a subtle form of entropy. I wonder if the system can be punctured.

Everything is accelerating within this gradient of disorganization, the speed is like frenzied masturbation. They have organized the direction of our pleasures.

When I look again the man and the woman are still slumped in their chairs, alone in the room.

I get my coat and head down into the street.

I have my weapon.

I walk to the building.

I want to see what theater this is.

The city is a hall of mirrors.

There is a doorway that leads to some stairs and I figure what floor they are on and buzz the intercom until I am admitted.

I scale the stairs. I face two doors.

My estimation of the direction the room faces and the layout of the apartments leads me to one and I kick the door in.

I walk through a hallway and find them.

They are naked and real. Blood spatters the walls, my binoculars do not pick that up, this is a better image.

They are dead and there is no sign of why this has happened.

I consider if this is an interlude between acts.

I hear coughing and a shuffling noise as if offstage an understudy has dropped his script.

I turn, a man wearing a hat is standing in the hallway and he begins to run when he sees me.

I run after him.

He starts to go into the apartment opposite and I grab him.

He pulls a knife and I draw my gun.

He slips away from me and slams the door.

I stand in the hallway saying I found them.

He does not hear.

I leave.

I return to the hotel.

I know I have to find the man in the T-shirt.

I watch the city come alive as day breaks.

A gray sky pales against the electric lights.

I watch the workers leave and return. They are drones. They hum.

The air conditioning is wheezing. I consider they are poisoning the air.

I watch the sky fade.

I scan the area for the man I must find.

I consider that he may be a politician.

I look at the apartment but they are not there. The man and woman who led me to this have gone.

I consider that victims draw others into their drama.

I muse on their culpability.

The city buzzes with decay and erotic violations.

It crackles like a psychotic snake.

I go to my car and drive. I tour the city looking for him.

The next day I buy a newspaper.

I am wanted for two murders. The man at the apartment must have taken my picture.

Talking to him is pointless. I look at the room now, but it is empty, a space where there is no indication of what has happened.

It is a vacant stage. Someone is running the theater.

I know the games others play. I think I may be a prop in someone’s drama.

The bodies were real. The killing was real.

I tour the city.

I stop the car near the river and walk along its edge listening to the noise of the water.

As I walk I see a shop selling clothes.

In the window is a T-shirt with a bull on it.

I return the next day.

The T-shirt is gone from the window and women’s dresses are on display.

Party dresses that no one can wear. Women do not wear dresses any more, androgyny is prevalent as is the need for desexualization within the political program.

I enter.

A bald man stands behind the counter, he is talking to someone at the back.

There is a door and beyond it another man.

I walk towards them.

I want to see the other man.

“Did you finish them?” the bald man says.

“Two shots, that’s all,” the other man says.

They turn and see me.

He could be the man I saw in the apartment. He could be the man I am looking for.

They stop their conversation abruptly when they see me. I leave.

I consider they are a cult. The T-shirt is a uniform.

They are a faction of the government. A faction we do not know about.

I think of the man’s face at the window, as he stood and shot them.

It may be him.

I drive to the shop at night. There are no - shirts in the widow. There is nothing in the window. As I walk away I see a tooth lying in the corner of the empty shop front, a tooth with some dried gum attached to it.

I read it in the newspapers. They are looking for me.

I am wanted. I consider the word.

The streets below me are full of want.

I have become an object of desire within the veiled campaign.

They want me, and a man with an image of trite anonymity is pulling the reins and dragging the sharpened bit of the bridle into a blind horse’s mouth.

The animal’s eyes stare with obscene redundancy into this blackness.

There is a hole at its heart.

Some contagion of acid.

It poisons the flesh of the city.

It generates need and the odor of money as it soaks in the sweat and feces of our days.

The lights below my window bomb like fireflies through the violent night.

The people are ravenous with the hunger of a lifetime’s need.

I train my binoculars on the apartment.

The room is empty.

The lights from the building sparkle with a sinister glow.

I can stay in the hotel.

They won’t find me here.

I will find him.

I drive through the city looking for him.

Hitchhiking

by Richard Godwin

Direction has the sound of breaking bones. They splinter beneath memory. Memory is the thing you cast away a long time ago before the road and the endless miles spun beneath your dreams. Direction is not a point on a compass, any more than a breaking wave is the axle on a car.

I hitched a ride as sharp hailstones cut my skin. It was the day that knowledge was born and I crawled beneath the discarded placenta of unnatural birth. The tattoo on my arm that read “Home is never North” was bleeding as I climbed inside the truck that bombed down the deserted highway.

The driver almost broke my fingers with his grip.

“I’m Don,” he said.

“Mike.”

Don used to pour meths in his tea and sit there talking of the times he made all the money.

His words sounded like a song I used to know; it was a melody whose words were lost to me. Don had huge hands, as big as two doors. They were made of wood and his knuckles were hinges. I liked that because the house we stayed in that month had no doors. He’d blown them off when he let off the bombs. Fire lingered in the slow dawn that bled pink across the scarred landscape.

“Mike,” he said, “they’re coming for us, suck on a pill while I shoot them.”

They came on Sunday. Their images were etched in the hills. They’d been trying for us for years. They traveled up hills and across farms to where we sat drinking. We needed them. We were wanted men, you see.

As Don picked up his rifle, it looked like a toothpick in his fingers. And I watched as the cops fell to the ground. The gunshots sounded like a gate crashing shut in my head over and over again, and a millions birds took flight in my brain, yellow and blue, chattering like parrots in the jungle.

It was blazing hot that year, the earth caught fire, and I saw the naked forms of soldiers rise from the mounds of split and severed soil, ochre in their martial glory. And I was ochre and lost and ruined and beside me was a warrior, a son of sorts.

Where are my soldiers now? Do they sing broken songs at dark when the fields are screaming and no one can hear at all?

That is what the road sounds like after a time. An immense noise, then silence. It’s a silence that deafens you. It is filled with the sound of bones crushing beneath wheels.

Don at the helm, hope in the injuries he sustained, the scars like stanzas crawling across his wasted skin in a glory of epic verse. This was the time we lived in the in-between; we sold promises like a last breath to the desperate sick, ruined people we encountered on our way, knowing we were running out of highway.

That Sunday, Don fired at the police but there were more coming. They followed one another like a line of ants up the hill to our fortress.

“I’m bringing them down!” Don yelled over the noise and the smoke. “They are mine, Mike, for they do not come here to venture with laws that have no place in the hills.”

His eyes shone out of his face like torches and his head was made of rock as he shot policeman after policeman.

I picked up a gun and fired blindly into the day.

I chewed on some of the blue pills, my mouth awash with a rancid taste of rust and melted butter. And even the visions, glorious images from a heaven on the tip of my finger, even they did not abate the knowledge that they were coming for us, that we couldn’t hole up there anymore.

A newspaper flapped in the breeze and I saw Don’s face staring up at me from its yellowed pages. It was his mirror, a signal proof he’d existed and been someone, the person sought by the police. I didn’t count the bodies they claimed were his personal achievement in a fallen world. I didn’t read their analysis of his crimes. What are crimes in this poisoned maze? What black promise first broke you?

Don had a polite way about him even when he was violent, and I’d become hooked to the action way back when I first drank whiskey with him in a bar in the desert.

It was a shelter where the barmaid had a familiar face. All the women serving drinks in sand. They fall through the hourglass.

Between her words, she said things to me, the coded things we know in our sleep. She had a key on her hip and I wanted to find the door it opened. I knew the door led South.

Don and I lived on the edge of time and for a year, I found direction with him. He took me from the road of wandering, thumbing rides with strangers who all smelled of sexual need and shame. Cold sweat ran down their backs as they went to wash the memory of me away. I’d already been washed down the drain with the jagged razors I recall one bright summer morning. There’s always crying in the wind, a woman’s voice from long ago, no face, I managed to blur the edges of that. I wanted to paint a set of eyes and lips on that hole in the heartland. And so I journeyed. Traveling through small anonymous towns in the dark, I searched for the day.

When Don killed the cop, it all became defined again. I could feel my heartbeat for the first time in years. The edges of buildings looked like razors. Straight razors set there by a hand whose inviolable rules denied all rebellion.

We headed to his pickup and down the tracks that crumbled beneath our wheels. Don spat a yard of blood into the lawless air. He was injured and didn’t care because we were immortal in those days before time found us.

We slept through hot days in a nowhere motel. We were wanted and that meant something.

We entertained women from local towns and found their faces grew full of spite at their knowledge of who we were and might become.

“I have to find her,” I told him.

“Your wife ain’t coming back,” he said.

I’d entertained him with a lie, and the truth was, I’d never been married; it was something I’d said to make him feel I’d lived once. My sense of deceit sickened me. I never wanted him to know. Such commissioning of respect once revealed as an adolescent ruse is the cause of more loss than men can articulate.

One day in a bar, I sat sipping beer while Don went to steal a car. And I knew it had to end, that they would find him and I would be cut loose. The barmaid had small, soft, tortured eyes which turned the other way as I ordered another round, a solitary drinker remembering his life before the action came around.

As she fixed her hair in the mirror, she saw me watching her.

“Turn you on?” she said, coming over to the bar and resting her sharp elbows on it.

I took her wrists and stroked the scars.

“Your old man will beat you to death with an electric plug and you ask me that? I am your son, I always loved you.”

Then I heard the gunshot. My whiskey rippled in the sleeping glass.

Don was outside, revving the engine, and we drove through cities where the ink was drying on the lives inside the homes we passed.

And one afternoon, they caught him. I watched from a dripping doorway as they hauled him off in chains. It took six men to take Don. He removed the door from their police car and smashed one of the cops in the face with it.

Who knows how many he’d killed? Do statistics cure us of the lies?

The police were stealing cargo all along, dealers in prestige, they’d brokered deals with every moneyed person along the scar that was the road.

In jail, Don tortured a prison guard. He spent a night taking this guy apart. He ran a soldering iron across the man’s face. He set fire to his head with his Zippo lighter.

But if I told you there was gentleness in Don, would you believe me? If I told you he once gave all his money to a starving woman, would you think I was lying?

If they burnt you with electrodes, who would you be? If they took away your face, how would you sound?

I drink beer now that is stale and flat. The road is open, but there is only the noise of the wind and the voices that fill the air.

The Last of the Cowboys

by Richard Godwin

Jackson Boulder was born with a harelip. As the midwife showed him to his mother, she took one look at him and said, “He looks like a rabbit, my boy looks like a puling rabbit.”

His father turned away at the sight of him and they took him home covered up so the neighbors wouldn’t see him.

Jackson grew up just outside Rochester in a bleak spot of flat land and corn fields in Ontario.

His father ran the same farm his father did and he made use of the boy as soon as he could walk.

Schooling was a painful endeavor. Although Jackson wasn’t stupid, his loss of confidence was both early and implacable.

Teased relentlessly by classmates, he took a few of the boys out with a single blow and avoided the girls who wounded him more deeply than he could articulate.

Jackson was strong and he withdrew into his physicality and rooted himself in the toil of the land. His father decided to take him out of school early and use him on the farm and he would rise in the half light and work the animals, pigs and cattle mostly. At sixteen, he could lift more than his father.

He rode a brown horse and his tall figure could be seen crossing the countryside at speed. He was a good rider and always wore his cowboy hat down low, saying little to those who knew him in the neighborhood and avoiding eye contact.

When his father died, he took over the farm, living alone with his mother there after his brother and sister left. They were protective and ashamed of him. And their protectiveness grew in equal measure to their shame.

Jackson grew into a thick-set man who was feared by the local kids for his deformity which was never spoken of by his mother.

They would hide behind some bushes after school when he rode by to catch a glimpse of his harelip.

Frank Palmer lived a few houses down and would sometimes be standing in his garden when Jackson passed by.

One morning he spoke to Jackson.

“How long have you been riding?” he said.

Jackson pulled his horse to and looked past the boy.

“ ‘Bout most of my life,” he said.

There was a pause as Frank, accustomed to adults steering a conversation, wondered what to say next, and Jackson waited, hoping he would be released from this unwelcome encounter.

The wind rippled the dry leaves on the trees over their heads as the two of them stood there.

It sounded like tiny shards of glass breaking.

Frank was unusual. He showed promise early on.

He lived in a ramshackle farmhouse with his large family and stood apart from them.

He was confident and good-looking. He had blond hair and deep blue eyes that the local girls liked.

As he grew up, he was one of the few people who spoke to Jackson.

One day when winds unsettled the fields, he saw Jackson getting off his horse and he greeted him.

Jackson nodded and tipped his hat at him. The entire landscape rippled in the wind and Jackson stood unruffled. He seemed to Frank that day some immovable presence on a shifting horizon.

Frank, now a teenager, stood looking up at this imposing figure thinking there was no good reason why he lived such an isolated existence.

“Do you ever do anything except work?” Frank said.

“Can’t say as I do much more than what I need to on the farm,” Jackson said.

“You run that place single-handed.”

“No one else to do it.”

“Ever go out?”

“I’m out now.”

“I mean to have some fun,” Frank said.

“I like riding and there’s always work to do.”

“You’re a good rider.”

“You got to know the horse.”

Frank wanted to ask him about the harelip but Jackson mounted and, tipping his hat at him, rode off.

Frank had a friend called Tom, who was the most even tempered person he knew. Tom seemed to carry on the same way whatever happened to him. He was slim and had shiny brown hair and he liked Jackson. He and Frank used to talk about Jackson and what would happen to him.

Frank left school and began his own business. He got into computers early and made a lot of money and he moved out of the area and made millions in California, marrying a beautiful blonde woman by the name of Sal. They never argued and Frank sometimes wondered if this was a good thing.

Sal was so well maintained and gave him such a boost every time he returned from work that he brushed doubt aside like a tiny wriggling worm beneath a place mat.

She was always waiting when he got in, often with a drink ready for him, and he felt he lived in a vast hotel run by unseen hands.

They had two kids and he lived the kind of life the friends he grew up with had no comprehension of.

He felt rejected by them.

Although he invited them out to visit, they turned him down, feeling they wouldn’t fit.

The only person he still spoke to from his old life was Tom.

He thought of Jackson, of what being rejected means and all the shapes it may assume.

He visited Ontario one Christmas when the snow lay so thick you couldn’t hear a sound.

He felt disconnected from it, as if he had never lived there.

He stood outside his life.

His wife and kids were in California and he wondered what they were doing. They seemed like images on a postcard.

He met Tom in a pub one night and asked about Jackson.

“He left the area,” Tom said.

“Jackson?”

“Yeah.”

“I never thought he’d leave that farm.”

“He did. His mother died. He carried on living there, working the farm alone, but there was some change that came over him, some sadness in his eyes when you saw him. It was just him in that farm. It must have been lonely, he’d always had his mother there to talk to, and as the years went on you saw him getting lower. One day Jackson announces he’s getting married.”

“Married?”

“He’d found a Filipino woman living in Chicago and he was flying out to meet her. His brothers and sisters all told him he was crazy, that she would take everything he had and dump him, but Jackson wouldn’t hear of it. He went out and met her and they got married and he sold the farm and left.”

“Did you meet her?”

“Only once. She was a pretty little thing who didn’t say much, but you know what? They were happy.”

“Are they still together?”

“Yes. He told his brother that he had a better life now, he had always been rejected and lonely and decided why should he live this exiled existence? He said she respected him and cared about him and he had someone he loved and he’d found a different life for himself he never knew existed.”

“I am so pleased for him.”

Frank returned to his California home and found the bright light and the beautiful people repellent somehow.

He pondered the significance of this and his success and the battles he’d fought to win the prizes he’d earned, such as their value was.

He wondered how advantage changed a person and blinded them to the suffering of others.

He dreamed every night of Ontario and its bleak horizon seemed filled with some light that was lost the second he opened his eyes.

He felt he inhabited a transient landscape and that it might slip into the sea.

Sometimes in the slow leaking of dawn he felt himself ebbing away as he heard the steady rhythm of horses’ hooves compacting the dry earth. The sound offered him some consolation for a wound he could not find.

One day his life changed.

He returned home from work to find his wife’s cases packed in the hall.

He was unaware of her affairs, since he worked so hard.

She stood there and said, “I can’t live like this any more.”

She didn’t tell him what lay behind her desertion until weeks later, weeks during which Frank sat around drinking all day, letting things slide. He thought of Ontario.

He felt that he’d lost the shape of himself. His wife and children seemed unreal.

He wondered what his life would be if he’d never left Ontario.

Sal turned up one day for some things she’d forgotten and found him drunk and unshaven.

She stood there with a list in her hand.

Frank looked at her hands and her perfectly-manicured nails as they rested on the white paper across which her bold writing crawled like a mantra of desertion.

“Frank, it wasn’t working, you were never there,” she said.

“I was always working.”

“Move on.”

“Where to? Where do all the broken people go?”

“You’re a successful man.’

“Do they go to a place in their heads or a place in their hearts where they can hide from the scars? Does the world see our scars and judge us at first glance, Sal?”

“You’re not making sense, Frank.”

“That’s why you left me.”

“No. That’s not why I left you.”

“You don’t see any scars?”

“No.’

“Did I ever tell you about Jackson?”

“You have so many business contacts, I can’t keep track of them all.”

“Jackson grew up near me. He rode a horse and wore a cowboy hat. He lived this lonely life and people avoided him. People never came near him.”

“Why?”

“Because he had a harelip.”

“That’s sad, but they can be fixed these days.”

“You think everything can be fixed, but you can’t fix some things.”

“Frank, I need to go.”

“Listen to this, Sal.”

She looked at her watch.

“What does this mean to you, Frank? This sad man with a harelip?”

“He was shunned. He ran a farm. He was a good man. His mother died and he wanted companionship and married a Filipino woman.”

“He got a catalog bride. Good for him.”

“No, he didn’t get a catalog bride, Sal. I think he is happy. She shows him respect and they love each other, they’re still married. He has something now his old life never gave him.”

“What does it all mean to you, Frank?”

“I remember him, he rode tall on his horse, I was afraid of him as a boy and he meant no harm to anyone, he was lonely and he left and found happiness and it makes me cry, it makes me cry.”

Sal stared at Frank who stood there with his eyes full of tears.

“Why does it make you cry?”

“Because he was always there.”

“He sounds like the last of the cowboys,” she said.

“Yes, that’s what he was.”

Frank was blinded by his tears as they rolled off his face and splashed on the expensive tiles he had put in his hallway and he barely made out the dancing form of his wife as she left him.

He stared at her from a window as she drove away and walked around the empty house like a lost child.

He wondered when he would see his kids again.

Eventually he sold the business and went back to Ontario to visit the old family homestead.

PIKE N FLYTRAP

Richard Godwin.

She wore silver jewellery that chinkled when she walked, so much of it so you couldn’t see her arms.

She called herself Flytrap and sucked orange peel from her fingertips after eating duck.

She could sing a song and eat candy at the same time and she would whittle wood with a sharp knife she stole from a truck driver. She had a small serpentine scar on her neck.

That morning she was sitting by the pool drawing on her tanned thigh with a marker pen.

Pike could make out the tracings of some ornate design. She’d just written the words “fuck my” when he walked up to her and said “May I complete that sentence for you?”

She cast her brown eyes upon him and let them rest there a while.

“Pull over a seat,” she said.

He removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow and sat in the shade, looking at her slender tanned figure.

Flytrap had a profoundly feminine appeal without any hint of dependency.

She was athletic and sensuous and her face was full of gratification and indecency.

“Pike,” he said, extending a hand.

“Interesting name,” Flytrap said, taking it as she ran her eyes down his legs.

“What’s your pleasure, Pike? I hear fish like you have sharp teeth.”

“Sharp as they need to be to do the job, though pleasure’s another matter and a deep pool.”

“You like your pools deep do you?”

“I do.”

“An what’s the job?”

“Bringing disorder to those who live the lives of quiet fools.”

She looked intently at him.

He had deep green eyes, he was unshaven, and he had a certain consistency of design to his face that made him handsome.

Flytrap never thought any man handsome. She got her kicks other ways.

As they talked the man at the next lounger looked at them over his copy of Playboy, tucked away behind The National Enquirer.

“Maybe you’re mad, Pike,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Your pleasure?” she said as the waiter passed by.

“I like to sink my teeth into flesh, though right now I’d settle for a beer.”

“A beer and a Tequila,” she said.

She sat forward and adjusted her bra strap, letting one breast pop out momentarily.

A few minutes later the waiter returned with their drinks.

Something inside Flytrap hungered and aroused itself as she knocked the Tequila back. She waited while Pike sipped his beer, the foam bubbling on his upper lip.

Then she reached across the hot space between them, ran her finger across his mouth and licked the froth from her fingertip.

“I like the exchange of bodily fluids,” she said. “It’ll tell you a lot about a man.”

On the next lounger the man put his magazines down on his bright shorts and watched Flytrap out of the corner of his eye.

She leant forwards, her skin-tight bikini like silk against her body.

“Pike, wanna come back to my room and fuck me?” she said.

He sipped his beer.

“Now there’s a proposition a man may not refuse.”

“I’m sweet, I’m dirty. I’ll leave the door open, I always leave the door open, it’s a thing I got. Room 100,” she said, “now I’m gonna strip off, so come and get me before someone else does, because what I got between my legs is the sweetest thing you’ll ever taste.”

“Room 100.”

She walked away and the man on the lounger looked at her ass and felt himself slide into a lifetime of fantasy.

After a few minutes Pike got up and walked away.

So did the man.

At the room Flytrap stripped and waited for Pike.

He walked in and stood there and they made a few noises of the kind you hear in a porn movie as the man stood in the bushes and listened.

Pike pushed the door to, although not entirely, and the man crept forward.

He stood inches from the door and to the side to get a view. Through the crack he could see Flytrap naked.

She had one leg up on the bed and was rubbing oil onto her breasts.

Suddenly Pike reached out an arm and yanked him into the room.

He shut the door as Flytrap covered herself with a towel. Then Pike hit the man so hard he spat a tooth across the room.

Pike got his pistol and pummelled him with the butt until his head ran with blood.

Meanwhile Flytrap went to the pool and walked off with the man’s bag.

She got the keys to his room and found his wallet from which she removed a large sum of cash.

Back at the room they tied him up and left. They drove away in a blue Toronado which they abandoned for a black Ford Pike bought at a small car dealership on the edge of nowhere.

They drove on.

Some hours later they stopped at a road side diner.

Flytrap bought some gum from the machine and sang “I wanna be your dog” while chewing.

She blew a bubble and looked at Pike.

“Think Iggy would like my rendition?”

“I think there’s a few things about you he’d like. Man you is good at spotting ‘em, Flytrap.”

“They all brag about their wealth, they’d cream their pants at the sight of my wet pussy.”

“He’s loaded.”

“Did you see the way the motherfucker looked at my tits?”

“Can’t say I blame him.”

“I had to have dicks like him squirting their come in me for years before I started this con and it’s been worth the ride, I say who fucks me and who don’t.”

“Yeah ‘n right now it’s Pikey boy.”

“Lucky you.”

“Let’s get a beer and think where to go to now.”

They held their bottles close, cradling them like lovers who offered consolation against the coming night.

And it fell from the sky like a caul.

There was no moon as some black presence entered the small restaurant where they sat, the only customers, eyed by the idle waitress, intent on chewing gum and getting home.

She looked at them with thinly-veiled hostility when Pike asked for two more bottles.

Reaching across the table she brushed the edge of Pike’s arm with her hand. She held it there longer than was commensurate with an accidental gesture and there was a lingering exchange of glances between the two of them that didn’t go unnoticed by Flytrap.

“Hey, whatchoo looking at?” she said.

The waitress turned to her.

She was short and stocky and younger than Flytrap by too many years. And it was the years and their toll that coiled in Flytrap like some hatching snake she had consumed with contaminated water.

“Just doing my job,” the waitress said.

Flytrap stood up.

“Well, fucking do it and get.”

“No need to talk like that.”

“No need to – what? Where do you get off you fucking ho, looking at my man like that?”

“He don’t look like your man.”

“An what does that mean?”

“Just a feeling. You two, here in the middle of nowhere, you ain’t a regular couple and all, you sure as hell ain’t husband and wife.”

Pike watched as Flytrap raised her hand then buried it in her pocket.

She sat down and drank some beer as the waitress walked away.

“Jealous?” he said.

“Of that little cunt?”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“What?”

“Used flesh.”

“Fuck you.”

“Easy baby, we run with this trip we stay chilled, or we take another road down.”

“What other road?”

“Beneath the jewellery and the sexual acts I see someone with a monster feasting on their tired heart and the older you get the more you’ll feel the struggle unless you sate it. It only drinks from one river.”

“What the fuck is this? Poetry hour?”

“You hold a losing hand. The deck you deal from loses worth with age.”

“I pull tricks, you need me.”

“I need you, Flytrap, because your assets are attractive to men, desperate sick men with no one in their lives, who will never know the soft touch of a genuine lover in the hungry night that haunts us all.”

“I can pull any man I want...”

“But that ain’t what you want is it?”

“I reel ‘em in and hook ‘em and I throw ‘em back when I’ve used ‘em.”

“Yeah, you work their tired muscles and you drain them, but there’s something else there it your eyes and I seen it. You hate mankind, and woman too for that matter.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You yearn for something more than the power you get from your sexual appeal.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“You mean out of the restaurant or out of the conversation and that darkened corner of yourself into which some soiled light is being shone?”

“You know what I mean.”

“You saying all you want is this? Pull more tricks, fleece these guys?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember something, Flytrap. We’re involved in an exchange that is deadly and we need each other. You make the rules and you break them, we aren’t dealing with some little fling or cheap fuck down at the local bar where a few tears and a bust up will end things. Our road is bleeding and it heads one way. You say that and you break it, then I make the rules, and the rules I’ll make will bring it out of you.”

“Bring what out?”

“Who you long to be.”

“I’m going to the john.”

“I see you when you don’t know I’m looking.”

“Let’s go find our next trick.”

“He’s already here.”

“You sure as shit are talking weird, Pike.”

“It’s the trick you been playing on yourself ever since that hatred and hunger began in you.”

He raised his eyes then and held her there, pupil to pupil in the black night. It seemed to him there was some flicker of hesitation, a wavering moment that was lost forever when she was about to reveal something. “What did they do to you?” he said.

She looked away.

“We go when I come back.”

Pike watched her walk to the john.

He absorbed the empty silence of the restaurant.

When Flytrap got out she found the waitress in the store room. She was bending over some boxes and Flytrap kicked her from behind.

She dragged her heel across the woman’s face, opening it up, and then poured beer into the wound.

“Look at me, you little cunt,” she said. “Don’t mess with the other women’s men or you will wind up dead.”

From beyond the open doorway Pike watched as she stood over the younger woman, a yellow pool gathering at the edge of the starched white uniform.

Then he went back and sat down.

Some time later Flytrap came out.

“Ready?” she said.

“You were a long time.”

“Women’s business.”

“Is that your answer to everything?”

“What?”

“Play on the endless web of illusions that exist between the sexes. Get a man horny if he’s getting too close, so you get closer to push him away.”

He stood and they left the restaurant, but as he got into the Ford he said “I forgot something.”

“What?”

“My hat.”

He went back in and reached underneath the table to where he’d put it and walked to the store room.

The door was shut.

He pushed it open and turned on the light.

Flytrap’s heel marks were all over the naked body and he had to step sideways to avoid the blood. She’d tied the woman’s bra around her head and her face looked blue.

Beside her lay the emptied contents of her purse, the things that Flytrap discarded.

A picture of a smiling baby floated in the urine. It was mingling with the blood and the colours were turning orange, like some wasted sunset on the waitress’s life.

Pike took some beers and went outside.

He drove a few miles and stopped at a small lay-by. Beside it was the rotting carcass of a dog.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

Flytrap looked away, searching for a shape in the featureless night.

“These people don’t matter, Pike.”

“Not to us they don’t but what about their families?”

“She was nobody, she was going nowhere.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“No.”

“You changed the rules. Now I make them.”

“And what are your rules?”

“We carry on, but I’m going to bring in a different element to it.”

“More tricks?”

“Yes, and then I drag you across the line.”

“What line?”

“The one that’s kept you sane all these years.”

Flytrap turned and looked at him.

“I’ll make it up to her.”

“How? How you gonna do that?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“That waitress is dead, you can’t do nothing for her now.”

Flytrap looked past him at the night and tried to trace the shape of a face that she once knew, but she couldn’t remember the features any more.

And Pike looked at her and read the lines on her face as a map of lies.

“What do I do?” she said.

“There’s nothing you can do to stop becoming the person you’ve avoided all your life.”

“What are we, Pike?”

He looked at the scar on her neck, moving like a small snake on her skin in time with her pulse.

“That ain’t the question,” he said, “the question is what we’re becoming.”

They sat and drank and decided to move on down to Mexico.

They’d been touring the States performing this routine for a year before the real killing started.

BARBECUE THE SINK BEAST

Richard Godwin

They found it in the kitchen sink. Just a little bit of head jutting up over the thick layer of grease that lay on top of the filthy water they served guests when they weren’t alone.

Harry stood there looking down at it as Jocelyn scratched her ass through her nightie.

“What the fuck is it?” she said.

“Don’t know.”

He grabbed a skewer and jabbed it.

“Hear that squeal? Sounds like a fucking pig.”

“How the fuck would a pig get in our sink, Harry?”

“Think it’s food, Jos?”

“Get rid of it.”

Harry turned to look at Jocelyn as she stood by the open door, the light wind outside rippling her nightie and the sun passing through it. His eyes wandered down to the blur at her crotch and he said “Let’s go upstairs.”

“You wanna fuck me, get rid of that thing.”

“Why?”

“It might come upstairs and rape me.”

Harry considered the proposition, running his oil-stained hand ponderously across his chin.

“I love to hear your bristles crackle in the horny afternoon,” Jocelyn said.

“Well, I ain’t shaved yet.”

“You never shave, Harry.”

“So the deal is dispatch this beast and I get your peach.”

Jocelyn nodded.

Harry opened a cupboard which had knives attached with leather straps to the inside of the door. He removed a large bag which he placed on the floor and unzipped. He pulled a long knife from it and inspected it. It glistened. All Harry’s knives were clean. He always cleaned them afterwards. Jocelyn liked to watch. She also liked to hear them scream. She said Harry had the cleanest cutting action she’d ever encountered and she’d encountered a few of them, as the scars on her breasts clearly showed.

“I think this’ll do the job,” Harry said.

He walked over to the sink where its head was rising from the filthy water.

It had black eyes with long lashes like a girl, and its bloated head looked as though someone had kicked it and it was swelling up with bruising.

“I can’t see a body”, Harry said, peering down at it.

Jocelyn walked over to the sink.

“Maybe it don’t have one.”

It was looking at them, its eyes darting from Harry to Jocelyn and back again as Harry jabbed it with the knife.

It screamed and Harry pulled away a section of grey flesh that dangled like rubber from the end of his knife.

He walked to the back door and flicked it off, watching the flesh land in the cadaverous yard.

He walked back in and inspected the sink.

It was trying to climb out. It had one limp foot perched on the edge of the sink and was scraping a long curved nail against the side, coughing spittle from its crimson mouth as it jabbered in a strange tongue.

“What the fuck is this?” Harry said, “It’s got a foot like a duck-billed platypus.”

“Kill it.”

So Harry started stabbing it, puncturing it repeatedly with his knife until it was red and dripping.

He stood back and waited to see if it was dead.

Jocelyn looked at Harry and felt a surge of arousal. He had his knife by his side and it was dripping blood onto the soiled linoleum floor.

“You know how many times we come on this floor?” she said. “I want you to fuck me with that knife when you’re done.”

Just then it started shrieking again.

It jumped up and stood on the edge of the sink and pulled its cock from its fur and stood there masturbating at Jocelyn.

Harry stabbed it again, this time lodging the knife deep in its fur.

He waved it around on the end of his knife and it flew off the end and landed by the door.

It stood there jabbering and then ran at Jocelyn and sprayed her with yellow come.

She wiped the strands of glutinous ejaculation from her yellow cheek and kicked it. It flew against the wall where it started barking at them.

“What the fuck is it?” Harry said.

He went over to the cupboard and got out his flame thrower.

“Pass me the paraffin, Jos,” he said.

It was making obscene noises at them, a strange cacophony of high-pitched whistles and groans that sounded sexual in nature. Then it ran at Jocelyn waving its cock at her as Harry doused it in paraffin and set it alight.

They stood there watching it ignite like a Roman Candle and run outside into the yard, spraying piss all over the walls.

“We’s lovers ain’t we?” Harry said, laying an arm around Jocelyn’s shoulder.

She reached down and felt his crotch.

“Sure nuff,” she said.

They walked upstairs past the heads stuck to the wall, past the hides and pelts that lay on the floor, past the blood stains on the light switch, and into the bedroom where several claws lay on the faded carpet.

Jocelyn pulled off her nightie as Harry walked over and ran his hand across her nipples.

“They look like buckshot, baby,” he said.

“Nothing like a little frying to make me wet. Come and feel me Harry, run your knife hand deep inside me.”

****

They lay in the twilight watching the shapes blur so that the claws looked like small knives on the floor. Harry got up and went down to the kitchen where he got himself a beer from the fridge and walked over to the back door. He looked down at the burnt body and stepped into the yard.

He had to tread over the clumps of fur that lay scattered everywhere. Some of them were desiccated, some had bits of flesh attached to them and were in various stages of decomposition. At the edge of the yard was a head, dried and bleaching from the sun.

Some animals were gathering at the yard’s end, scavenging for bits of still edible meat. They watched Harry, staying back until he went inside.

He cleaned his knife, polished it, and put it back in its case.

Then he got the body from the yard and put it on the floor.

Jocelyn came into the kitchen and stood there looking at it.

“Smells good,” she said. “I want you to barbecue the sink beast.”

“Get your fine old sauces dripping.”

“They already are, baby.”

“I’ll spoon the flesh into your savage mouth.”

Jocelyn curled her tongue up to her lip as the light caught the gold stud in it.

And Harry started making supper.

NOWHERE TO RUN,

Richard Godwin

Joe headed out of The Flamingo Bar into the yellow dawn that broke like sulphur on Junk Street. He’d been in there all night thinking of ways to come up with the money. His feet felt leaden on the hard road as he remembered Mandy’s face the night before. He knew he’d run out of excuses.

Turning the corner to Railyard Street he bumped into Rocco with his salesman’s eyes, hair greased back, collar up to hide the scar that ran in a red streak from his neck to his ear.

“Hey Joe,” he said. “Thought you’d left town, the amount of times I knocked on your door, how’s Mandy?”

“I’ve been busy, Mandy’s good.”

“I’m sure she is. You got work?”

“I heard you got out, I was going to visit you.”

“All that time inside, Joe. I saw you only once. I been out for months.” Rocco laughed. “It’s OK. I got plenty of visits, from people a lot better-looking than you.”

“I wondered how you been doing.”

“Well here I am, Joe. I got a job going if you’re interested.”

“I dunno.”

“No killing involved. Shooting that cop was dumb, shit, do I look like a cop killer?”

“Na.”

“Exactly. I got style, feel this coat.”

Rocco offered his lapel and watched with canine eyes as Joe ran his hand across the material.

“Joe, there’s a cool four K riding on this, you get half. Wanna be a loser all your life?”

He playfully jabbed Joe in the shoulder.

“Doing what?”

“Simple job, what do you say?”

“Half, huh? Maybe I’ll come round later and you can tell me more about it. I ain’t promising nothing, though.”

Rocco straightened Joe’s dirty collar.

“You need to smarten up Joe, you look like shit.”

Mandy was sleeping back at the damp apartment. Her naked legs were astride the night table, her arms sprawled out on the grey sheets. A train chugged by and the bedroom shook as Joe read the note she’d left him when she staggered in at five: “Either you get a job or I’m leaving. I ain’t doing this no more.”

He ran his eyes down her back and stared at the tattoo of a naked woman wrapped around a dollar bill that spread from her spine to her buttocks. He leaned and kissed the nape of her neck.

“I’ll buy you more tattoos Mandy, you’ll see.”

He lay down and shut his eyes.

When he opened them it was dark. He rose and tried the light. There was no bulb in it. He navigated the room in the lurid beam shed by the streetlight, which illuminated the rusty water dripping down the back wall. Mandy’s purse lay on the edge of the sofa. Joe reached inside and took out ten bucks. He walked two blocks to the store, where he bought some beers. Mandy was getting out of bed when he walked in.

“Darlin, I’m gonna get a job, I’m gonna get us out of here,” Joe said.

“An how you gonna do that?”

“You’ll see.”

“Joe, we’re only in our twenties and what have we got?” She fished her panties off the chair, which sported a broken spring. “This shit hole by a railway line in Desprit.”

He looked at Mandy and thought how with her deep green eyes and black hair she could have so many better men than him. Then her lightbulb crackpipe on the broken coffee table caught his attention.

“We’re another bulb down,” he said.

“I’ll get a straight shooter later so you can watch me get dressed under the overhead light.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“What?”

“Put on your panties when another man’s fucked you in them.”

“They don’t fuck me in them baby they fuck me butt naked. An now’s not a good time to get jealous.”

“What does that mean?”

She lit a Marlboro, her eyes like pinpoints as she looked at him.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Is it mine?”

“Sure it’s yours, they all wear a rubber.”

“Mandy?”

“It’s yours.”

He reached out and touched her arm and she turned her head away.

“I want it,” he said.

“How we gonna bring a kid up?”

“I’ll make money.”

“Doing what? You ain’t had a job in years, you got no qualifications, we live in the poorest town in America.”

“This time it’s gonna live.”

“What future does our baby have, Joe, with you and me as parents to look after it?”

“Give up crack and it will live.”

“I’ll have to give up my career first.”

“Do it.”

“While you go and work in Wall Street?”

“Remember burying her, Mandy? That night, you and me over by the park with a stolen spade? Remember that tiny body in the cold ground? You puked your guts out.”

“How could I forget?”

“I read your note.”

“I ain’t doing it no more.”

“Give me till tonight.”

He left her standing there and headed out beneath the rusted iron bridge which cast a constant shadow on their apartment. A train thundered by as Joe made his way to meet Rocco.

They sat on a leopard skin sofa at Rocco’s apartment. Joe looked with envy at his lifestyle, the plasma screen TV, I-pod, clean furniture, new carpet.

“Where d’you get all this?” Joe said.

“Does it matter?”

“So what’s the job?”

“It’s simple,” Rocco said. “This friend of mine owns an office block, it’s all legit, I got the keys.”

“He wants you to rob his office?”

“He ain’t got no insurance, wants out, he’s given me the combination. We go in, get the cash out of the safe, and leave.”

“Simple as that?”

Rocco laid a steady hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“One thing I learned inside is not to go back in.”

“So why do you need me, Rocco?”

“There’s a night porter, I know the times he does his rounds. We get to the office by the back stairs, he never uses them, but I need you to keep watch while I’m getting the cash. My friend takes sixty percent and between you and me it’s a straight fifty-fifty cut.”

“That’s kind of generous of you, Rocco.”

“I’m a generous guy.”

“It’s like you’re doing me a favour.”

“Joe, I got responsibilities. My kids ain’t getting all the things I’d like them to.”

“I seen them, they’re doing OK.”

“You don’t know. You ain’t a father yet, consider Mandy.”

Joe thought of Mandy, of new tattoos, of another town, where he didn’t feel like spitting at himself every time he caught his own reflection. He nodded and Rocco drew his cashmere coat around his broad shoulders.

Beneath a sullen moonless sky they made their way to the office block that existed like a scar on a street teeming with restaurants and late night bars. Raucous drunks staggered out onto the stained pavement, arms heavy on their women, who wobbled on high heels, spraying cheap perfume into the air. Joe and Rocco scurried by, collars up, heads down in the anonymous night.

Rocco had a key to the back door and they scaled the iron stairs on rubber soles to an office on the top floor, assisted by the torches they held in front of them like stiletto knives. It all went smoothly as they moved silently within the building. The safe was set in the wall behind a painting of a man fishing in a lake and Joe helped Rocco remove it and set it down on the floor. Rocco fumbled with the combination as Joe checked the hallway. All quiet except the satisfying click inside the office. Rocco removed the cash and Joe helped him bundle it into two holdalls. Then they made their way downstairs.

“Easy, see?” Rocco said.

As they were passing the second floor a door opened and a large security guard came out. He said nothing as he reached for his gun. Joe froze as Rocco pulled a Glock from his coat and shot the guard. He dropped to the floor like a wounded bull and Joe watched the blood pool by his head. Rocco headed outside, Joe following.

Back at his apartment Rocco handed out the cash.

“What did you mean about Mandy, Rocco?” Joe said.

“She’s a good-looking woman, and you ain’t gonna keep her if you don’t develop some style.”

“Is that what you got, style, shooting the guard?”

“Screw him.”

“You can’t help killing, can you? You just got out, you’ll be first on their list.”

“What you gonna do Joe, tell em?”

“Have you screwed Mandy?”

A smirk began to crawl across Rocco’s mouth as he looked away.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“No?”

Rocco lit a cigarette and stared out at the black backdrop of night as Joe grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him round.

He hit Rocco in the face, knocking him over a chair. The cigarette singed Rocco’s lip and his nose opened up.

“That was a dumb thing to do Joe, real dumb.”

Joe grabbed his money, his hand burning, as Rocco stood and pulled a knife. He was by the door when Rocco slashed at his shirt. He looked down and saw the ripped cotton and the gash in his stomach. He held the bag in front of him to ward off the knife as Rocco came at him again and he headed out the door and down the stairs, dripping blood on the ruined steps.

Mandy stirred in her sleep as Joe entered the apartment. He inspected the wound in the bathroom. It didn’t look too deep and he bandaged it.

The next morning over coffee he said to Mandy, “Let’s get out of here, you me and the baby.”

“Where we gonna go, Joe?”

“Anywhere. I got money.”

“How?”

“It’s a loan.”

“There’s blood on your shirt Joe, I saw it in the trash. You’re wounded.”

“I’ll see a doctor when we get out of here. Come with me, Mandy.”

“Loan. You got involved with Rocco didn’t you?”

“Why do you think it’s Rocco?” She looked away. “Is it mine, Mandy?” Joe said.

“It’s yours.”

They waited until night, avoiding each other in the wounded silence of the dripping apartment. They packed their few clothes into their tattered bags. And they got the last train out of Desprit, walking with the conviction of the hunted up to the platform on the creaking iron bridge that scowled down on Railyard Street.

As they waited, Joe clutched the holdall with the cash in it, as if he was clenching the slender promise of a future in his hand. He jumped every time someone walked up, but no cops came, and finally the last night train limped and wheezed down the line and they got on. They sat side by side watching the long line of misery that were the final houses of the town they were running from shrink and fade on the grey horizon. And the empty train rocked its way into the black unknown landscape outside.

“Where we going Joe?” Mandy said.

“Anywhere. Away from here.”

“Away from us, Joe? We’re going nowhere, we ain’t got nowhere to go. Look at this, it’s like a ghost train, and we’re the only two riders.”

“I got cash. We got a future.”

“Stolen cash, they’ll find you.”

“No they won’t.”

“Joe, I been keeping us afloat by letting other men screw me, what does that make us?”

“It don’t make us nothing. You’re mine, all mine.”

“Joe you don’t know yourself, you’ve separated who you are into bits, and the pieces you don’t like are buried in a drawer.”

Joe was clutching the arm of the faded seat with white knuckles as the train sped into the silent night.

“All I used to want was for you to embrace me, to hold me. How come you don’t hold me no more? It takes a piece away Joe, it steals your hope. I tried to be your girl, I tried to belong to you, but what I had to do to support us made belonging impossible.”

“It’s in the past.”

“We are the past.”

“Leave it back there. There’s a future growing inside you, Mandy.”

“It got spread around, Joe, you’re the great pretender, it’s like you went deaf with despair.”

“What did?”

“My hooking. You never heard them talking? I got used, everyone knew. All those men. It’s killed something in me.”

“Men like Rocco? Tell me Mandy, are you carrying his baby?”

They passed through a tunnel and in the altered light Mandy’s face changed. She looked older, harder, like someone else. As they came out of the tunnel she turned to Joe with cold clear eyes.

“Does it matter? It could be anyone’s. What are you, Joe? A piece of Rocco’s charity?”

“You fuckin bitch, nothing is ever good enough for you.”

A stranger entered the carriage then and Joe looked at him in the bleak window of the moving train as he hit Mandy. He had no control over this other man who punched his soiled lover in the gut, doubling her over, as Joe tasted all the poisoned impotent years gathering like a black tide inside him. Then Mandy was screaming and Joe was trying to say her name, but his voice was torn in his throat, and no words came, only a gasp of despair like a howl erupted into the train.

Joe looked down at the littered floor. He noticed Mandy was bleeding and he reached for her, his hand falling through the air, as the train jostled on the broken track, knocking him against the side of the carriage. He put his hand to his side and it felt wet. As the train thundered on, Joe’s wound opened up and all he and Mandy had left was the endless embrace of the black night around them.

HANGNAIL

Richard Godwin

After the first lot I thought I’d get some peace and quiet. But as soon as they moved in the noise started. And the parties, every weekend, packed with undesirables, music going on into the small hours. They never played any songs I liked but that other stuff, the kind the papers call alternative.

I saw them the day they arrived. The removal lorry was blocking the road. I had to park around the corner. I was sipping my tea standing by the window, looking down onto the street. He was unshaven and his clothes looked dirty, not the sort of man a girl takes home to meet her mother. She was a tart, it was clear at first glance. Too much makeup, skimpy clothes.

I would have put up with them if they’d been quiet. And all throughout the time they lived there I suffered with that hangnail. I’d caught my finger in Mr. Harris’s filing cabinet, the large one he kept down in the basement of the offices where I worked as an accountant. I’d told him it was rusty and needed replacing but Mr. Harris was always one to save, economy was embedded in his thinking. I kept cutting it and chewing it, but every time I tried to remove it my finger bled.

Still, he wasn’t a bad boss to work for. It was him who encouraged me to take the exams to become a chartered accountant. And that was partly the problem, while I studied at home after a long day’s work they partied. That and the bloody hangnail that I tried to remove again and again.

It was after a few weeks of noise that I made the decision I’d deal with them. I watched them in the street one Saturday afternoon. Their guests had left beer bottles on the pavement, and they were standing there laughing as I struggled to concentrate. She glanced up at the window, saw me and smirked. I’d never really noticed her face before, but now I saw it was cheap pretty. I mean her features weren’t bad, but the face was a slut’s. Her bra strap was showing.

It’s amazing what you find in someone’s dustbin. I learned a lot about them the following afternoon.

I’d watched them get in their car with two cases and drive off in the morning. I waited for Mrs. Jones next door to go and visit her daughter. The young woman beneath me was away on holiday and the couple who lived under the troublemakers were in the country. The weather was perfect, overcast and dark when I went out and stood behind the uncut hedge that shielded me from the street. It was easy, in one movement I bent over the small fence that divided the properties, opened their rubbish bin and lifted out two black sacks. Then I took them into the hall of my flat.

I was careful to leave everything as I’d found it. I wore gloves as I went through the contents. Apart from the food and the usual, there was a surprising amount of useful information. I took out the receipts and cards and began making notes.

They’d just celebrated Valentine’s Day and she’d bought some heart candles and sexy knickers from Anne Summers. She’d thrown the back of a prescription for some thrush ointment in the bin. It was stained with tea and gave me an idea. Friends had sent them housewarming cards, among them Gloria and Fred. My new neighbours were called Kevin and Molly. She came from Bristol and worked in Victoria.

It took me about fifteen minutes and I placed all the items back in the sacks, tied them up the way they had, and put them back in their bin. Then I waited, giving them a chance. I thought if they quietened down no action would be necessary. I’m a reasonable man, after all.

But it didn’t stop. That Sunday was peaceful, and reminded me of what the area used to be like, before the last lot. But these were worse. My previous neighbours used to fight, and play the odd bit of music, but Kevin and Molly were real party animals. I knew there was no point in complaining.

The follow week I wrote the letter on an old typewriter. When I finished writing it I sat back and laughed.

‘Dear Kevin,

How’s Molly? I hope her thrush has cleared up, it’s a bit nasty isn’t it? Anyway I just wanted to warn you that after screwing me last week she said she was dumping me. She’s screwed quite a few of her exes while she’s been with you. I thought you ought to know. She’s fun isn’t she? I like her heart candles and those butterfly open crotch knickers she wears.

I met her in Bristol. You and she were already going out together, but she said you were a bore and she needed some excitement.

I can tell you I gave her that. Anyway she’s a slag, if you don’t believe me ask Gloria and Fred, they know all about it.

Yours,

The bloke who’s been fucking your bird.’

I posted it wearing surgical gloves in a side road in Victoria away from any CCTV cameras.

I was careful, I think accountancy teaches you that. I used tweezers when I put the stamp on, dipping it in water, not touching any part of the paper or envelope. That night I dumped the typewriter in a skip. Then I spent a quiet evening eating a nice fisherman’s pie watching a programme on TV about cricket. That was until the party started.

I wasn’t sure if it would work, but she was a tart and therefore her boyfriend probably had his suspicions about her. I just wanted the parties to stop. I knew they were renting, the To Let board had stood outside for weeks. People like that don’t own. I’d never envisaged what was about to happen.

They got it the following day. I was washing up my dinner plate when I saw Kevin come into the kitchen. He was white-faced and I saw him put the letter down on the table as Molly walked in. He drew the curtains. They’d never drawn the curtains in the kitchen before. As I dried the plate I heard shouting, then it all went quiet. The light was on in the kitchen when I got up at two for a pee.

The next day after work it was all quiet. The flat next door was empty, the windows dark. It was like that for weeks. The peace was blissful. I threw myself into my studies.

That weekend I went to dinner at the house of a work colleague. That was when I met Brenda. She worked as a dental assistant. She was nice looking and old-fashioned. I took her to the pictures the following weekend. The film was a bit mushy for my liking but she seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards I kissed her. The flat next door was still empty when she spent a weekend with me, but she wasn’t right for me. Too fussy. And I wanted to spend my weekends gardening. I felt as though I’d been neglecting my roses when Brenda left.

I’d almost forgotten about them when I saw lights on next door. Kevin was standing in the kitchen with a man drinking beer. He had the window open and I stood in the bathroom listening. He was drunk and talking loudly. I caught their conversation in waves.

‘She swears she didn’t but I still don’t believe her,’ Kevin said.

‘You think she’s pregnant?’

‘I don’t know, the problem is she lied to me.’

‘So she did see him?’

‘She said it only happened once but months ago, before we moved here.’

‘Maybe she’s telling the truth.’

‘That’s not the point, if she slept with him while we were together then she might still be doing it.’

‘How’s Molly taking it?’

‘I saw her last night for a drink. She’s really done in, I’m worried about her, she’s lost a lot of weight.’

‘Look it sounds to me like her ex wanted to cause trouble between you and he’s succeeded. Why don’t you try talking to him?’

‘Molly did. But he refused to speak to her.’

‘I know what I’d do if I were you Kevin.’

‘What?’

‘Find out if she’s pregnant and if it’s yours.’

‘Then what?’

‘If you can trust her enough take her back. If it was months ago you’d only just started seeing each other, remember that night we all went out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You shagged that bird at my flat.’

She moved back in a few days later. I saw them having dinner at their kitchen table. She looked smaller somehow. It was quiet for a while, then the parties started again.

I thought about what I should do while I studied and played with my hangnail. I spent my weekends digging the hole for the pond I wanted to put in at the end of my garden, next to my roses. I’ve always grown the most beautiful varieties, their perfume is the sweetest you’ll encounter in a private garden. I know just what to feed them too.

I was enjoying the quiet one weekend when I saw her coming home on her own. Mrs. Jones was with her daughter and the others were all away. I watched her stand in the street and look up at her flat. Then she rang my bell. The postman tried to deliver the package that morning and I’d taken it in for her.

When I opened the door she said, ‘I think you’ve got a parcel for me, I’m Molly by the way, I live next door.’

‘Yes, I think I’ve seen you.’

As I was handing her the package she said, ‘I just tried to get into my flat but the lock won’t work, would you have a look at it?’

‘Of course.’

We went next door and I tried her key.

‘Someone’s put glue in the lock,’ I said.

‘Glue?’

‘Kids probably. I saw some hanging about earlier.’

‘Well what do I do?’

‘You’ll have to call a locksmith, I know a good one.’

‘Would you mind? The battery’s flat on my phone.’

‘Not at all.’

When she came inside I noticed she was quite short. It’s funny, until she was standing in my living room I hadn’t seen that.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ I said.

She ran her hand through her dark hair.

‘That would be nice.’

‘Beer or wine?’

‘I’ll have a beer.’

I left her and went to the kitchen where I made the call, keeping the phone off as I spoke.

‘Two hours?’ I said in a loud voice, ‘but my neighbour can’t get in.’

When I came back I shook my head.

‘He must be busy.’

‘Two hours isn’t too bad, I could always go and do some shopping.’

It had started to rain and she glanced at the window.

‘Mind you, you want to be here when he comes.’

‘That’s true.’

‘You can wait here.’

‘I’ve had a terrible day, our shower’s broke, I couldn’t get hold of a plumber, Kevin’s away with his family, I just wanted to come home and eat something.’

‘Well, I’ve just put some lasagne in the oven, it’s far too much for me, why don’t you join me?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course. You can have a shower if you want.’

‘That’s really nice of you.’

‘Not at all, I believe in getting to know the neighbours. Here, let me take your coat.’

‘And we’ve never even come and said hello to you.’

I showed her the bathroom and handed her a fresh towel. As she was closing the door she said, ‘I didn’t get your name.’

‘Arnold,’ I said.

I watched through the hole above the mirror. It was there when I bought the flat and I’d just left it.

Molly unbuttoned her blouse as she ran the shower, putting her hand under it until it was hot. Then she slipped off her shoes, and wiggled out of her jeans. She was wearing a red bra and tiny panties. I could see it all through them before she took them off. She looked at herself in the mirror, then undid her bra and slipped her panties down. She was shaved and she looked used, a whore, just like I knew she was the first time I saw her. I watched her wash herself then went and got dinner ready.

She came out and sat at the kitchen table looking at her flat.

‘It’s funny how much of our place you can see from here,’ she said.

‘Another beer?’

‘Thanks.’

‘So you say Kevin’s away?’

‘He won’t be back for a few days, so I’m a bit lonely, I was thinking of having a few friends round tomorrow night, having a bit of a party.’

‘Sounds fun.’

‘What is it you do, Arnold?’

‘I’m an accountant.’

‘Oh this is nice,’ she said, digging into the lasagne.

I was cutting the pasta when the hangnail jagged on the fork. She saw me looking at it.

‘Those can be tricky,’ she said.

‘Damn thing’s been driving me mad for weeks.’

‘I’ll take care of it for you, it’s what I do, I’m a manicurist.’

After dinner she went and got her handbag and fished out some tiny clippers. I sat on the sofa and she took my hand and put it on her right thigh and clipped the hangnail off.

‘There you go,’ she said, ‘now I’ll file it for you.’

My hand brushed her breasts as she filed the nail. It was quite obvious what I was feeling, she glanced down at my trousers and giggled.

‘Do you think he’ll be here soon?’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘The locksmith.’

‘Shouldn’t be long.’

I stood up and went to wash the dishes. She came in and looked out of the window at my garden.

‘You’ve got so much more space than we have,’ she said. ‘Kevin admires your roses.’

‘Come and have a look at them,’ I said.

I took her down the stairs to the back door. I’d been trying to tie some bushes back with rope and had left a length of it by the back door. I picked it up as I saw her looking at the super glue.

‘Thanks for getting rid of it,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The hangnail.’

‘Do you mind if I use your phone?’

I slipped the rope around her neck and drew my hands across one another. It didn’t take long to choke her to death. Then I carried her outside and buried her in the hole I’d readied for the pond. I covered her with earth and patted it down. It was about midnight when I went to bed.

They never did find her body, the police spoke to the neighbours. They asked me when I’d last seen her and I said weeks ago. Kevin looked quite upset for a while. Eventually a To Let board appeared outside the flat again. The peace I’d sought returned. I was gardening one afternoon when Kevin rang my bell.

‘I think you’ve got a parcel of ours,’ he said. ‘I found a slip from the postman.’

‘It’s been here a few days.’

He came in and I gave him the package.

‘You’ve got a nice garden,’ he said, looking out of the window.

‘Would you do me a favour and help me tie some bushes back?’

I took him outside to the end and he held the branches against the fence while I put two tight knots around them, just above where the pond would have been.

‘Beautiful smell,’ he said.

‘With roses you have to know what to feed them.’

He looked diminished and older, as I showed him to the door.

‘I’ll be leaving in a few days,’ he said.

‘You probably want somewhere with more outside space.’

He shook his head and walked away.

I passed my exams and became a chartered accountant. I do all the accounts for the manicure company Molly used to work for. One of the women there is quite attractive, she’s been doing little favours for me. I don’t have hangnails now, I even get my nails done for free.

ELEGY TO A SPEED RACER

Richard Godwin

For A.J. Hayes

No rage against the dying of your light,

But a series of Ali-like moves,

Your footwork a blur on the canvas,

You had him on the ropes twice,

His lips broke open, he spat teeth, speeches made of sand,

You didn’t even sit when the bell rang.

Your defiance was allied to silence

Your onward march against the negative,

You maintained the positive against the coming night

And gave your support and generosity to those around you.

You asked for so little,

Words, and encouragement poured from you.

You came to London expecting rain

And spent a week of Indian summer,

A time as rare as a Dodo in the ancient city,

Where you searched for Jack the Ripper in

The sexual ruins of Whitechapel,

And witnessed Turner’s bleeding, swirling seas in the echoing gallery.

You drank your coffee at the Red Café,

And returned to San Diego,

And I always thought I’d see you again

My friend, a word overused and too often misunderstood.

Your love of books and writing was the genuine thing

There was no posturing in your thoughts.

I imagine when you rode bikes it was the same energy

The same force at work, a passionate engagement with the act.

Perhaps you’ll never know how much you gave

Or how naturally.

But the burden of your giving is the loss

Of conversation to be had with you.

Real friends are rarer than the Dodo bird.

And the time spent with one assumes an eternal quality.

Those moments live on, and acquire something more than time

Or the seconds that tick by on the watchful clock,

That artificial companion of all the static times.

There is nothing static about a speed racer.

The Santa Ana winds will come and go in San Diego

Fetching the smell of eucalyptus and avocados from the endless coast,

Summer will blaze against the night on the beaches

And large fish will wash ashore and rot,

Men and women will make feverish love on the sands

And laws will be broken and enforced, or not.

Flies will irritate the living and moths will hunt for light

And beat their paper wings against window panes,

Leaving ephemeral dust behind their brief flight,

But you will not be there to see these things

Or smell the seasons turning

Because you are gone from this world.

We build engines to race against time,

Massive tires and helmets,

We lean into the bends,

We blur the road,

Our lives a rapid heartbeat,

We’re haunted by the taste of whisky

And seduced by the eternal female,

Life is, after all, the curve of a woman’s hips.

But left with the internal conversation

I notice this, my friend

Your departure is a presence, whose roots grow each day,

Oh, and there’s fresh coffee at the Red Café.

EULOGY TO A.J. HAYES

Richard Godwin

I was honoured to know Bill, and spend a week with him and his wife Thury in the late summer of 2012 in the UK. When Bill came to London he used to like to go to the Red Café in Richmond for his coffee with Thury. He told me he had started writing the following in his notepad:

‘What is a boy from Virginia, who lives in California, doing in London in the Red Café, run by Indians?’

I told him there was a story there and he should write it. Bill wrote the most economical stories, full of wry humour, and passion, full of poetry and lacking any spare meat. He was an immense supporter of writers, an unerringly generous man. This was balanced by his modesty about his own writing. Bill was arguably the best read man I ever met. I first met him on A Twist Of Noir. There followed a series of emails and we found an immediate affinity. We talked regularly on the phone about everything, from every type of fiction, to politics, travel, sport, music, and art. Bill had a fantastic sense of humour, always delivered with a deadpan expression.

He wrote beautiful and honed verse. When he read another writer’s work he tried to engage with what the writer was doing, and he brought a wealth of knowledge and understanding to that. He took a library with him, a volume of knowledge, of a life’s learning. He used to mention how, born in the Virginia countryside, all he had was books growing up. He said his first pusher was a librarian who got him hooked. He also told me once he wanted to be known as writer’s writer, and I think he achieved that aim. His ability with prose is born of great skill, but he never pandered to popular taste. There were many strings to his bow. Bill rode AMA Class C in his younger days. And he pushed his fictions to the same edge as a professional racer.

Bill was a passionate man who held onto his principles, challenged corruption and fought for the vulnerable without trying to steal any glory. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer he battled it quietly and with a courage that is an example to us all. His parting has left the world diminished. I will never forget him.

DONALD DUCK AND THE AVIAN SNITCH

Richard Godwin

“I’m telling you she’s got a parrot stuck up her arse,” Micky said.

Jo-Jo stirred his coffee.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m saying Nancy has always liked birds, right? I managed to get her to shave it down to two fucking birds, two parrots to be exact, and one of them has gone missing.”

“So you assume, as we all would, that it’s living up your wife’s arse.”

Egg dripped from Micky’s fork as he waved it at Jo-Jo.

“Every time she bends over she makes a sound.”

“Must be all them beans. Are you going to eat that?”

Jo-Jo made a move for Micky’s sausage, which sat in a pool of grease on his plate.

“Get out of it, you fucker.”

He stabbed at Jo-Jo’s hand with his knife.

“I tell you Micky, ever since you did those drugs you’ve been talking shit, absolute fucking shit. You sit there letting your food get cold, you spray me with egg, you need to sort yourself out, mate.”

“Nancy’s the only one I need to sort out. I ain’t joking, we went shopping the other day. She was getting some tins off the shelf in the supermarket and as she bent over I heard this noise.”

“Sound like a fart?”

“No, it sounded like a groan, an erotic one.”

“An erotic groan?”

“Aw, ooooh.”

“You winding me up?”

“And why would I do that, me old son? Partner in fucking crime, right?”

Micky shook his head, and squirted tomato ketchup all over the remainder of his food, chewing ravenously.

“There was a case of a woman in Alabama”, he said, “who liked a bit of anal. Her husband said she had capacity.”

“Capacity?”

“He lost a tool box up there. She used to sing gospel you know. Well, she got excommunicated from the church because her parrot kept singing ‘fuck all y’all’ in the middle of the chorus.”

“She probably had Tourettes.”

“No she fucking didn’t. She farted feathers. They found a spanner up her when she died. And you know what she died of?”

“Bullshit?”

“Myxo-ma-fucking-tosis, me old son.”

“That’s what rabbits get.”

“Who fucking cares? You might think I’m talking bollocks, but I know there’s something up Nancy’s arse.”

Jo-Jo leant forward.

“Stop taking drugs, Micky.”

“Don’t you lecture me, sitting there with a fucking ton of metal in your gob. All those piercings, you could get infected.”

“Some women like them, I got one on my knob.”

“So I heard.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You go around with you head shaved wearing a week’s stubble, you think that looks sharp?”

“You could be damaged by your own jewelry.”

“Are we gonna do this fucking job or what?”

“Yeah.”

There was mischief dancing in Micky’s eyes as they paid for their lunch. Then they left the cafe, stepping out into the debris strewn street.

“Now, he’s on his own, so we’re in and out quicker than a whore’s snatch,” Micky said, when they got to the small post office a few streets away.

“I know the score.”

They put on their masks.

The man behind the counter didn’t look up as they walked in. He didn’t hear Micky lock the door. He only let out a small gasp when he put his paper down and saw two men with guns dressed as Donald Duck standing in front of him.

“Give us the money and you won’t get hurt,” Micky said.

They waited until he opened the back door and then Jo-Jo went into the office where he stacked the bundles of cash into the holdall.

“Easy,” he said.

As he was leaving he saw the old man’s finger hesitate on the panic button and he smashed him across the head with the butt of his gun.

They ran from the shop. They removed their masks in a back alley, dumping them in a dustbin.

“You know what I’m going to spend this on?” Micky said. “I’m going to drug Nancy and stick an endoscope up her arse.”

Jo-Jo tapped his temple.

“You’re sick in the fucking head, mate.”

Nancy was sleeping when Micky got home. He stood in the living room as evening fell outside the window, and opened a tin of Boddingtons.

A parrot stood on one leg in a cage staring at him.

“We did the job and I’m loaded, me old son,” Micky said.

“Up yer arse,” the parrot said.

“Jo-Jo is....”

“A fucking cunt.”

The squawks and obscenities roused Nancy, and she came downstairs.

“Micky, are you teaching Freddy to swear?”

Her negligee was open at the front, and Micky ran his eyes down her body.

“Fancy a quickie, Nance?”

“I’ve got to do my night shift.”

“Come on, let me give your arse a slap.”

“Charming.”

“You’re not hiding something up there are you?”

“Like what?”

“What happened to Sammy?”

“I told you, he flew out the window the other day. Have you seen him?”

“I’ve heard him.”

“Where?”

“Every time you bend over.”

She went upstairs to dress while Micky opened another beer and made faces at Freddy.

“Oooh I like a cock ring,” Freddy said.

As Micky got drunk, Nancy was straddling Jo-Jo in her stilettos. He was lying on his kitchen floor as she lowered herself onto his cock and licked her lips.

“I love your metal. This one rubs my clit just right, you naughty man,” she said, chuckling.

“You ain’t half got the best arse, Nancy.”

She pounded his cock until she collapsed on top of him and dripped two drops of sweat onto his eyebrow piercing.

Afterwards, as she dressed, Jo-Jo said, “Micky said anything weird?”

“Like what?”

“I’m worried about him.”

“Have you two been up to mischief again? I don’t want him going back inside.”

“No, we’ve been as good as gold.”

“So why are you worried? He don’t suspect nothing.”

“He was saying some weird things about parrots.”

“My Sammy’s disappeared.”

“He says he thinks it’s up your, you know.”

“My what?”

“Your backside.”

“He’s mucking around.”

“No. I think he might hurt you Nancy, I’m serious, he had this look in his eyes, wanted to stick something up there.”

“He’d never.”

“Watch him,” Jo-Jo said.

That night Nancy woke to find Micky peering up her nightdress with a Maglite.

She kicked out and knocked him onto the floor. He lay there with the beam of light pointing at the ceiling as she stood up.

“What the bleeding hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I want to look at your arse.”

“Go back to sleep, Micky.”

“Show me your arse,” he said, getting to his feet.

“What do you want to put up there?”

“Who said anything about that?”

She looked away, and Micky grabbed her arm. Nancy slammed her fist into the side of his head and kicked him in the groin.

“You’re sleeping on the sofa tonight.”

“I knew I was right,” Micky said, as he stumbled down the darkened staircase.

He was woken early by the sound of Freddy saying, “This one rubs my clit just right.”

He was standing outside Jo-Jo’s flat when Nancy got into the shower.

Micky kept his finger on the bell until Jo-Jo opened it, then he smashed him in the face, knocking him backwards into the hall.

“You fucking slag, you’ve been shagging Nancy.”

“I said you were fucking mental.”

“You told her about the endoscope.”

“Bollocks.”

As Jo-Jo got up Micky grabbed his nose piercing, ripping through his septum.

“The parrot’s grassed you up.”

He slammed Jo-Jo’s head repeatedly into the wall until he wasn’t moving.

He went to his lock up on the way home. He fed Sammy and cleaned his cage, then took two pictures of him on his mobile.

Nancy was in the kitchen when he got in.

“I got something to show you, Nance,” he said.

Her eyes were brimming with tears as she stared at Sammy.

“Where is he, Micky?”

“He’s safe, but if you want to see him again I want you to do two things.”

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“Yes. Stop shagging Jo-Jo and tell the cops I was with you yesterday afternoon, all afternoon, we were having sex.”

“Are you mad? Me and Jo-Jo.”

“He’s admitted it. Jo-Jo’s not the sharpest tool in the box, I tell him I think there’s a parrot up your arse and he tells you.”

Nancy hung her head.

“It was only a fling, Micky. I was angry because you went inside.”

“You’re my alibi, Nancy.”

“You won’t hurt Sammy will you?”

“Not if you do as I ask.”

Micky had already made the call, given the local police the tip off. It wasn’t the first robbery Jo-Jo had committed, he’d carried out a spate of them in the previous weeks. When Nancy was fucking Jo-Jo, Micky went back to the alley and got Jo-Jo’s Donald Duck mask. He stuffed it under his sofa when he left him lying in the hallway.

Jo-Jo found himself arrested later that day and immediately grassed Micky up. But when the cops visited him, Nancy stood firm by her alibi.

Micky returned Sammy to Nancy who cosseted him as Micky got drunk.

“I swear those birds are the only things you care about,” he said.

I wasn’t long before she realised that Sammy wasn’t well. She took him to the vet and returned teary eyed.

“He’s got psittacosis, Micky,” she said. “They’ve given him shots.”

“That’ll sort him, Nancy.”

Micky had himself vaccinated a few days before.

That night as Nancy slept he put on some gloves and rubbed dried parrot droppings from Sammy’s cage into Nancy’s mouth.

CYPRESS TIME

by Richard Godwin

And so in cypress time we ran

And searched among the dead leaves

For memory’s ruined pattern

Lost among the years and silence,

An echo of a former time

The only time when the heart stopped beating

And the song rose internal

And amazed from the liquid gasp of your mouth,

That brooding entity of your lips

And the throat I kissed

Tenderly at first then with fire

In my tongue, the fire of the wood

And all the violent ecstasies we sought there

Lost among the leaves, and awakened memories rising like tendrils,

Our ochre world turned to sepia in recollection

With the deft beat of a fragile paintbrush then stained again with the color of desire

I fastened the gate and you latched the door

But you stood there staring back at the garden,

Its black shape yawning to the trees

Where we showed ourselves to one another

And there you stayed, amid the odors of night

Amid the fevered touch

And your pleasure there

With the moonlight caressing your soft shoulders beckoning us back to that time

Beyond your fluid skin

Inside the woods was where we were

That night alone with only our touch and the heartbeat of time,

Nailed to our cravings as we traced the pattern of pleasure and transgressed yesterday

And the trees summoned us to that hot world,

The world of sun and nocturnal pines,

Of Eros and his feverish rhythm,

In time and outside of it, ours the sensual metronome of the falling leaves.

FILTHY CUTE

by Richard Godwin

‘He wears these cream-coloured shorts, high up on his thighs, even in the winter,’ Mandy said to Trudy over a glass of vodka, ‘but they’re like stained, not really cream, you know, unwashed, dirty. He doesn’t wear a T-shirt, like some guys do in all seasons, you know, the macho ones who want to make a point, no, this guy wears a lumberjack shirt, and tiny shorts showing his outline. Remember me telling you about him?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘He makes me feel like washing. Guess what he wears on his feet?’

‘Stilettos.’

‘Boots, and thick socks. He has this dog, small thing on a leash, made of rope, and he’s got this pony tail, he stands there, one leg up on the wall as I come round the corner leering at me, this knowing grin on his face, eyeing me as I walk past. He’s disgusting, with his thick thighs he’s so proud of.’

‘Weirdo,’ Trudy said, pouring some more Smirnoff.

‘Well, get this, he says my name today as I walk past.’

‘What?’

‘“Mandy, right?” he says.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Are you following me? “I got a job for you,” he says.’

‘What job?’

‘He lowers the foot he has up on the wall, adjusts his shorts, and comes real close. “Good money, I hear you’re handy.”’

‘Sex?’

Mandy shook her head and lit a Players from the packet on the table, taking a deep drag.

‘Why d’you smoke these things Trudy?’

‘They make me feel butch, now what did creepoid say?’

‘Said he’s a go-between. Knows a bloke called Gary Mayers, said he’s heard I’ve done break-ins.’

‘You think he’s a pig?’

‘Na.’ Mandy stuck out her tongue and removed a bit of tobacco. ‘Said he knew me from a place I used to work at, remember when I used to dance.’

‘Sure. You remember him?’

‘I never looked at their faces, I just used to shove my ass at them and take the money. But he said he knew the guy who owned The Cage, Mickey the Wanker I used to call him, said he liked my rendition of Prince’s song ‘Cream,’ that I used to get real dirty on stage, which I did.’

‘Yeah?’

‘He must’ve seen me dance, he remembered what I used to do with a coke bottle. He said this guy Gary wants a painting stolen, and he’ll pay ten k.’

‘What sort of painting?’

‘That’s why I’m meeting him, to find out.’

It was a big house behind gates on a secluded drive in Sheen, the other side of Richmond Park. Mandy called the mobile number the guy in the shorts had given her, found out he was called Nelson and arranged to meet him and Gary the next day. She walked up and down the road figuring it was good to be late, not show too much interest, maybe even up the fee, then she buzzed and waited. She could hear dogs, big ones, barking, and shoes crunching gravel, then the gate swung open. A man with oily hair, small dark eyes, and a boxer’s nose stood there with his hand out.

‘Gary?’ Mandy said.

‘Pleased to meet ya,’ Gary said.

She shook, taking him in, the strong smell of cheap cologne, glancing over his shoulder at the large house.

‘Nelson said you wanted to speak to me.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

He still had her hand in his and she pulled it away thinking how small he was, guessing him for five four, two inches shorter than her.

‘Nice place.’

‘Come in and meet the wife.’

She followed him up the path, hearing the gate swing shut, walking past the dogs into a large cool hallway that smelt of pine needles.

‘Through here,’ Gary said, grinning and leading her along a corridor to a glass door that looked out onto a sparkling blue pool.

He held the door open for her and stood in the way so she had to brush past him.

Nelson was getting out of the pool in a bright green G-string and he grinned at her as he began drying his hair, wringing out his grey pony tail. She looked out through the windows at the large manicured lawns and calculated how much Gary was worth. To her right a topless woman rose from a lounger, a peroxide blonde in her forties with large boobs Mandy figured were cosmetic. She was attractive in a worn-out way and glanced over at Mandy as she put on her bikini top, bright blue with small yellow butterflies, matching the thong.

‘Mandy, you know Nelson, this is my wife Lucy. Can I get you a drink?’

‘Thanks, I’ll have a vodka.’

‘If you want a swim we got loads of bikinis. Guests leave them behind after the parties.’

‘I’m all right.’

Gary went over to a bar at the end of the pool room and came back with a neat vodka on crushed ice.

‘Come and have some cold cuts of meat,’ he said.

Mandy followed him into a room off the pool that was covered in images of Prince performing. A large table was set for lunch, beef, ham, salmon and trout in dishes under tight cling film.

‘I see you’ve noticed my little obsession,’ Gary said, running his hand through his hair.

‘You like his music.’

‘Love it, can’t beat it can you?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘A lot of people say I look just like him, Mr Prince Rogers Nelson.’

‘You’re short.’

‘I hear you used to dance for him, maybe you’ll do a show for us.’

‘I don’t do that any more.’

‘I understand, Lucy used to do an act, but she don’t like to talk about it.’

‘Nelson said something about a painting.’

‘Let’s have some lunch.’

Mandy sat at the table and picked at her food as Gary talked to Nelson about his pop idol and Lucy fiddled with her i Phone. Then Gary said it.

‘We know you used to thieve a bit, Mandy, we all got a past here, I tell ya. I use Nelson to find me people, he found you for me. I’ve become a bit of an expert in art. And I got my eye on a painting.’

‘What painting?’ Mandy said.

‘It’s a Cecily Brown, you know her work?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘Well I reckon she’s gonna be worth a bomb in a year or two, she’s already pricey now.’

‘What’s the painting?’

‘It’s called Sweetie, a depiction of a naked lady, thighs up, full thighs, you can see all the bits, and a big cock jammed inside her. Tasteful, though.’

‘Gary, spare us the details,’ Lucy said.

‘If she’s going to nick it, she needs to know what it looks like. Besides, this is art talk, Mandy knows the score.’

‘I’m trying to eat here.’

‘Well I ain’t stopping you.’

Lucy glanced at Mandy, then sipped her wine.

‘This lady’s lover’s sucking her nipple,’ Gary said, ‘and the whole painting’s peachy pink, beautiful in fact. Do you know Prince’s song Peach?’

‘Gary wants to acquire art to match his songs,’ Nelson said.

‘That’s right,’ Gary said, ‘a work of art for each of his songs, and this one works perfect for Peach.’

‘Gary’s had his eye on the painting for some time,’ Nelson said. ‘I knew you’d be right for the job.’

‘Nelson tells me you used to dance to ‘Cream,’ one of my favourite songs,’ Gary said.

Mandy wiped her mouth with her napkin.

‘It worked on stage.’

‘I bet it did. I like music that’s loaded with sexual connotation, that’s how I like my art too.’

‘I’m not sure that I’m the right person for the job,’ Mandy said. ‘I’ve never stolen a painting before.’

Gary wagged a finger at her.

‘No, but you were good, Handy Mandy they called you, the cops never got you. You’re ideal, don’t you see, you danced naked to Prince?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘This is all about Prince.’

‘I danced to lots of music.’

‘Yeah, but you were known for doing him, that right Nelson?’

‘That’s right, Mandy, the punters loved you. Filthy Cute they used to call you.’

‘I do wish you’d give us a show,’ Gary said.

‘I’m not going to break into a gallery,’ Mandy said.

‘Who said anything about a gallery? This is a house, right up the road from here, it’s a doddle, what do you say Mandy, ten grand?’

The house was easy. Just like Gary said. He gave Mandy a blueprint to the place, the layout of the rooms, the one she needed to get into, the precise position of the painting. All she needed was a Maglite. He gave her one, almost lost the job when he patted her ass as she left, but she was thinking about the money by then, cash he said.

It was a large building at the end of the road. The code he gave her opened the gate and she edged along the grass border at the side of the drive, avoiding the gravel, thinking do these guys use the same designer? It looked so much like Gary’s place she wondered for a moment if she was being set up, but then she found the window he’d described, pulled it open and she was in. She made it to the alarm within fifteen seconds, put in the code, and then walked to the end of the corridor and turned right. Second door. She could see the paintings on the wall, various nudes. She ran her torch across them, taking in the female genitals, then she heard a noise. It sounded like something being dropped overhead and she turned the torch off, stood there in the dark hearing her heart beat as silence fell again. She could see the outline of the room without the torch and she walked over to the painting, took if off the wall, put it in the huge plastic wrapper, and then back to where she came in and out of the window.

She took it straight to him. Gary opened the door in a dressing gown.

‘Got it?’ he said.

‘What do you think this is?’

She handed him the package, followed him inside to his study.

‘Vodka?’

‘Thanks.’

He poured her a glass, then unwrapped the painting. She watched as the plastic fell away and Gary stood staring at it, his back to her. She sipped her vodka thinking about the cash, Gary standing really still, appreciative, she thought. Then she heard sirens and saw flashing lights outside the window.

‘This ain’t Cecily Brown,’ he said, turning round.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look at it, you silly cow, you’ve nicked the wrong painting.’

‘It was where you told me it would be.’

She looked at it, the nude, the exposed genitals saying that’s all we are to you, raw meat, seeing flashes of men’s faces leering at her out of the crowd as she touched herself to Prince at the front of the stage, high on everything she’d never share with a man, and she realised it wasn’t the one he’d commissioned, similar, not the same.

‘How could you have fucked that up?’ he said.

‘I followed your instructions, he must have moved the painting.’

‘You’re gonna have to make it up to me.’

‘You’re not going to pay me?’

‘You wanna take it back?’

‘You heard the cops just now, he must have come downstairs. I heard a noise when I was in there.’

‘Dear oh dear, let’s hope no one saw you.’

She looked at it again, liking the sketch now, thinking the tits weren’t bad, wondering if she’d have got more self-respect posing for an artist rather than a bunch of wankers.

‘It ain’t bad, Gary.’

‘It’s a fucking Tracey Emin, I hate the cow. Unmade bed my ass.’

‘So what are you gonna do?’

‘You.’

‘Okay, don’t pay me then.’

‘No, you’re gonna pay me, unless you want another crack next door.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Neither do I, so,’ he said, coming over to her and laying his hand on her shoulder, ‘Lucy’s in bed, give us a show and a blow job, a few fucks, and it’s all forgotten.’

She folded her arms.

‘No.’

‘You’ve disappointed me, so you can do a little strip for me, you could even work at one of my clubs. Nelson said what you got between your legs looks like a sliced peach, have you ever seen his kitchen?’

‘No.’

‘You should. And you don’t want to cross Nelson, you’re lucky it’s me you’re dealing with.’

‘I’m not sleeping with you.’

‘Listen to me you slag,’ he said, ‘I gave you an easy job, offered you good cash, and you’ve failed to deliver. So, instead of me having the piece of art I want, you can do your Prince dance for me, what do you need, a bottle? Come, on, empty this vodka and show me how you did it.’

He thrust the bottle of Smirnoff at her, and his gown fell open, flashing his cock at her. Mandy glanced at it, thinking it’s tiny, I won’t even feel it. When she looked up Gary was staring over her shoulder.

Lucy was standing in the doorway.

‘Pop your cock away and stop hassling this girl,’ she said.

‘This ain’t over,’ Gary said, pulling the belt tight across his grown.

Mandy went out into the hall with Lucy, who winked at her and nodded in the direction of the pool. They went and stood by the blue water sparkling beneath the glass roof. Lucy was wearing a nightie and Mandy could see her breasts clearly outlined against the material. She wanted to ask her if they were real.

‘Gary’s usually all talk,’ Lucy said, ‘don’t let him worry you.’

‘I took the wrong painting.’

‘Did he threaten you?’

‘He wants to screw me.’

‘Well that’s cause he ain’t getting much of me, he has hookers round while I’m out, you see, mutually convenient arrangement.’

‘Thanks for coming when you did.’

‘I haven’t tonight, that’s why I couldn’t sleep, think you can help me?’

Lucy took Mandy’s hand and put it between her legs, but Mandy pulled away and began walking towards the door.

‘I can’t, I’m seeing someone,’ she said.

‘He won’t let it go, I’ll stop him,’ Lucy said.

Mandy ran out of the house, not glancing back at the closed study where Gary was on the phone to Nelson.

When Mandy got back Trudy was in bed and she slid in next to her.

‘So how did it go?’ Trudy said.

‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘No, couldn’t, funny that.’

‘Don’t, Trudy.’

‘Don’t what?’

Mandy sat up and looked down at her.

‘I got the wrong painting.’

‘I bet he wasn’t happy about that.’

‘He threatened me, wants me to sleep with him.’

‘What?’ Trudy said, sitting up now too.

‘His wife saved me.’

‘Yeah?’

‘She’s bi, she came onto to me by the pool.’

‘What have you got into?’

Gary found out that the owner of Sweetie had moved paintings, recently bought the Tracey Emin and hung it where the Cecily Brown used to be. He was a friend of Gary’s, and Gary bumped into him the following morning in the park as he walked the dogs, nodded and tutted sympathetically when he heard the story.

‘And I thought this was a safe area,’ Gary said.

‘I heard a noise then I went down for some water and saw the window open.’

‘What did they take?’

‘An Emin, I just bought her.’

Mandy rowed with Trudy, Trudy saying she thought she’d given up thieving, Mandy saying the money would help them get out of the damp flat maybe even start up the flower business they’d been talking about. They made it up that night, made love and slept in each other’s arms. When Mandy got up she decided she’d refuse to talk to Gary, stay away from him completely. That was until Trudy said, ‘That guy’s out there, the one in the shorts.’

Trudy was holding the living room curtains open a crack, and Mandy peered over her shoulder down into the street below. Nelson was standing against a wall, leg up, boot on the bricks, one hand scratching his balls, the other holding the rope that tethered the chain around his dog’s neck.

‘That’s him,’ Mandy said.

‘He’s revolting.’

Nelson looked up at them and waved. Mandy had a shower, then ate a bowl of muesli. An hour later he was still out there. He rang the bell and she ignored it, then watched him standing below the window.

‘I better go and talk to him,’ she said.

He smiled when she came out.

‘Gary wants to see you,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to see him, how did you find out where I live?’

‘I know all sorts of things about you, remember? I know about what mole you got right next to your pussy.’

‘Look, I like women, I used to strip for money, you saw me naked, it doesn’t mean I’m going to fuck you.’

‘No, you’re going to fuck Gary or he’ll hurt you.’

‘I wish I’d never agreed to do it.’

‘You better go and see him.’

‘Or what?’

Nelson raised his eyebrows.

‘What do you think?’

Mandy told Trudy about the conversation and they argued again, Trudy threw a pot of jam at her, Mandy ducked, the pot shattering against the wall. Mandy went out to think, got a bit drunk in a pub and decided she’d go and front Gary, tell him to lay off or she was going to the police. She walked there, held her finger on the buzzer until the gate swung open, then she marched up the drive feeling the adrenaline.

Lucy was standing at the door.

‘Gary’s out, or have you come to see me?’ she said

They drank Martinis, Mandy thinking it was a more sophisticated drink than vodka and feeling lightheaded now. Then Lucy went for a swim, naked. Mandy watched as she peeled off her skirt, then unbuttoned her blue blouse, glancing in Mandy’s direction. She wasn’t wearing a bra and Mandy wondered about those tits again. She slid her blue G-string off and got in the water, did seven laps and got out, stood there drying herself, one leg on the lounger, giving Mandy an eyeful.

‘You’re not shy are you?’ Lucy said.

‘I used to strip for a living.’

‘I seen the film.’

‘What film?’

‘The one Nelson made for Gary.’

‘Of me?’

‘Want to see it?’

‘I don’t believe this, is that what the job was all about?’

Lucy put it on in the bedroom. Mandy watched herself dance, thinking her figure was going a bit now, but she still had it. She was good, dancing to ‘Cream,’ pushing her hips out at the men at the front and fingering herself when Prince sang “You’re filthy cute and baby you know it,” putting on the hetero face she practised in front of the mirror.

‘That bastard,’ she said.

Lucy turned the film off, darkening the screen.

‘I can’t blame them.’

‘Just how dangerous is Gary?’

‘He gets people hurt, but Nelson’s worse.’

‘That pervert?’

‘He’s hung though, not like Gary.’

‘I saw it the other night.’

‘Look, he’s in and out in a second.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Like that, is it?’

‘I haven’t slept with a man since I was a teen.’

‘So you’re a real lesbian?’

‘Hundred percent.’

‘I can take care of Gary for you.’

‘How?’

‘You leave that to me.’

‘And what do you want from me?’

‘I fancy licking that mole on your thigh.’

Afterwards Mandy wondered if she’d feel guilty when she went back to the flat but she enjoyed it, Lucy had a good sense of humour and gave good head. She glanced up at Mandy as she was doing it, and said, “Sh-boogie bop,” humming the Prince song. She was attentive, took her time.

‘I’m glad you don’t shave,’ Lucy said, ‘I always wonder about those guys who insist on a waxed one.’

‘Men are such power freaks.’

‘But we know better.’

‘Are those real?’ Mandy said, touching her breasts.

‘Christmas present from Gary.’

‘How much did they cost?’

She figured Trudy would know, she did the last time. They argued for two hours then Trudy packed, got a cab to her ex. Mandy sat drinking until dawn, telling herself she wasn’t jealous, just dumb. Then she showered and looked at her breasts in the mirror as she dried herself, thinking about what Lucy had said. She liked Trudy, they were good together but she always felt she was going to do something Trudy would criticise later. Lucy was good in the sack, knew how to touch her.

Mandy decided she’d go out and buy some food, maybe get some rest. Nelson was outside the door when she opened it and he pushed his way in.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she said, backing away from him in the cramped hall.

‘Calling in a debt.’

‘I don’t owe you or him anything.’

‘Gary’s extremely angry, he knows.’

‘What?’

‘About you and Lucy, it’s all on film.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I enjoyed watching you two at it.’

‘You like filming things, don’t you?’

‘You don’t believe me, come to my gaff and I’ll show you.’

She’d never seen so much cream. Nelson’s kitchen was packed with it, empty pots and cartons stacked floor to ceiling, the fridge full of double cream, whipping cream, it made her feel sick.

He played her the film of her and Lucy. Then he sat opposite her on a chair, elbows on the table.

‘Fancy a coffee?’

‘No I don’t fancy a coffee.’

‘It’s simple, Mandy, fuck Gary.’

‘Or what?’

‘Let me show you another film, bit like a cinema here ain’t it?’

She asked for a vodka afterwards. The images made her wince, Gary hitting some bloke with an iron bar.

‘Do you normally watch TV in your kitchen?’

‘Best place.’

‘What’s with all the cream?’

‘Gary and me are obsessed with it.’

‘You mean the Prince bit?’

‘He thinks he is Prince, Gary’s nuts.’

‘And you’re not?’

Nelson stood up and touched his phallus.

‘I’m full of it, Mandy, I have to wear shorts so I can squeeze it out when it gets too full, you should try something different, I can reach corners of you that you don’t know exist.’

‘I’ll speak to him.’

‘You’re gonna have to do more than speak to him.’

All the way there she kept thinking about what Lucy had said.

Gary opened the door and led her through to his study. She stood there feeling stupid, an old sense of humiliation knocking at her anger.

‘Well?’ Gary said. ‘You screw me over, you screw my wife.’

‘I’m not gonna sleep with you.’

‘Put on a show for me, I’ve never seen you live.’

‘No.’

‘You asked for it.’

He swung his hand at her, then grabbed the belt of her jeans, forcing his hand inside as the door opened.

‘Gary, I’ll take over,’ Lucy said.

‘Says who?’

‘Says the girl who can spill the beans and get you put away.’

‘What beans?’

The second time was even better.

‘I kept thinking about what you told me,’ Mandy said to Lucy afterwards.

‘You mean about Gary?’

‘That you can handle him for me.’

‘You see, Gary likes films,’ Lucy said.

‘So you’d really go to the police with them?’

‘He needs to behave himself, I think he knows that, he won’t threaten you again.’

‘What if he does?’

‘I’ll send them the film of him unloading the drugs.’

‘What made you decide to step in?’

‘I used to swing both ways.’

‘And now?’

‘I think my door’s jammed when it comes to men. I’m tired of his bragging, he’s given me a good life, but I want to have a little peach with my cream now and then.’

‘I saw Nelson’s kitchen.’

‘Bizarre isn’t it? You know he whips it out at parties, big old lump of meat it is, nothing attractive about it, it’s just big, he slammed it down on some bird’s plate one night.’

‘He gives me the creeps.’

‘He and Gary are both nuts, dangerous though. Well done on the job.’

‘The painting?’

‘I used to design houses. I know the owner of the house you broke into, he showed the Tracey Emin to me, asked me where I thought he should hang it.’

‘You set it up?’

‘Only a little, Mandy.’

‘What did you do with the painting?’

‘I told Gary I could take care of it for him, my client paid a lot, far more than I gave to Gary. He doesn’t know much about art and a Tracey Emin is worth a lot more than a Cecily Brown.’

‘How much?’

‘Enough to start my business.’

‘Are you going to pay me my cut?’

‘You can promote your materials for free.’

‘What materials?’

‘The films of you stripping.’

‘You’re setting up a porn business?’

‘A real classy one.’

‘How much did you say that boob job cost?’ Mandy said.

‘Tell you what, I’ll throw one in for you as a softener.’

When Trudy came back they made love, they always did after a row. Mandy didn’t ask about her ex, and Trudy didn’t mention Lucy, they knew the way to each other’s hearts.

They lay in the darkened bedroom afterwards and listened to the sound of traffic outside. Then Mandy put on the film.

Trudy watched her stripping to Prince, moving in a way that was unfamiliar to her, laughing as she watched. She liked the bit when Mandy fingered herself.

‘That wasn’t you at all,’ Trudy said, ‘men don’t know what women are about.’

‘They think differently to us.’

‘You were good, though.’

‘I know.’

‘How many films are there?’

‘A few.’

‘What are you going to do with them?’

‘Make some dirty money out of them.’

TATTOOED HIGHWAY

Richard Godwin

Beyond the stained window the hissing scar of the highway looked deserted. Patty felt she was in the wrong town with no visa. The diner was empty apart from the guy in the corner. He’d been eyeing her all night. Patty was used to eyes on her, sometimes they felt like insects crawling across her deadened skin.

‘I don’t suppose you have a light?’ he said, walking over to her.

‘Sure,’ Patty said, flicking her Zippo, hiding the stain, snuffing it out. ‘Spare a cigarette?’

‘Oh yeah.’

The waitress bristled past, all swish of starched uniform and the click of over chewed gum. She looked at them out of the corner of her eye, a slight curl of her lip.

Patty stepped outside into the mix of ice cold and diesel fumes. After the initial silence, they started the smokers’ chat. Weather, journeys, directions, bitching about this and that, and then he said it. Just like that. No interlude, no build up. As if he was ordering a pizza. ‘Last night I killed a man.’

He took a deep drag and blew it skywards then turned and looking her right in the eyes, said, ‘A guy got smart. He was nobody, really. I shot him. Twice.’

‘That right?’

Silence. And just two burning cigarette ends in the cold and the smog. A truck whizzed by.

‘Why you telling me this?’ she said.

‘Cause there’s one thing I always feel like doing after I kill someone.’

‘No shit?’

‘Yeah. An’ that’s fuck a sweet young thing like you. You looked good to me in there sitting over that coffee. Thought you was gonna hit that waitress. First I thought maybe you was a dike, seeing how you kept looking at her, but I figured what would you want with a used up old whore like that? Then I saw those little gloves you’re wearing and I knew for sure you ain’t no dike. Those hands are made for one thing, sweetheart, and that’s whipping up its head in my pants. That coffee must have been colder than a frigid ass. ’Nother smoke?’

He held up the cigarette packet.

‘Thanks. Though, I ain’t gonna sleep with you.’

‘No. I ain’t askin’ you to sleep with me, honey.’

‘Just so’s we understand that.’

‘How old are you anyway, out here alone on the highway?’

‘Twenty-six.’

‘That right? There’s a bad dude out there, in case you ain’t heard, he’s been chopping women up. Much badder’n old Jim. I don’t kill ladies, just fuck them.’

‘I can look after myself.’

‘Maybe you need me to look after you.’

‘What are you gonna be, my sugar daddy?’

‘Heard one woman got her throat opened up real bad. Out here, alone, just her thumb in the air and only her poontang to pay. They call him the maniac trucker, although I hear this guy drives a pick up.’

‘Thank you for the smoke,’ she said, walking back in.

Inside, the waitress stared at her from behind the counter, hands on her hips. Just another anonymous judge. Patty watched her stare fade. The waitress went out back. Patty felt weak and as she tried to remember the last time she’d eaten, Jim walked in, laughing, almost dancing across the diner to where she sat.

‘Come on, darling, we can do it in the john,’ he said.

The smell of pizza drifted across the air.

‘How much you got?’

‘I knew you were a pick up. I reckon you’re worth a hundred.’

‘Hundred and fifty.’

‘Done.’

He peeled a stack of tens out of his wallet and laid them in her palm.

‘I’ll see you in the john,’ she said.

After a few minutes Jim made his way there.

She was standing at the back, past the urinals, outside the only clean cubicle.

Jim walked in and put a broom handle against the door.

‘Well, hallelujah baby.’

‘Come on,’ she said, walking into the cubicle, pulling down her jeans.

‘You’re safe with me.’

‘I know.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can always tell, now come on get it while it’s hot.’

‘You’re as sweet as cherry pie, ain’t you?’

His zip made a harsh sound in the empty john. She saw endless miles of road as his skin made contact. She thought she heard someone trying the door as he entered her. She looked over Jim’s shoulder at a fly crawling across the graffiti. She felt the cold wall against her buttocks as he stopped.

He winked and ran his finger across her cheek.

‘Told you I ain’t the maniac trucker.’

Then he looked down at her right forearm and shook his head. There was a jagged scar running through the tattooed word “Mom”.

After he left she heard a pick up drive off as she checked herself in the mirror.

She was thinking about food when the door swung open and the waitress walked in.

‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I saw him leave, I’m calling the po-lice.’

‘Why you such a bitch?’

‘You just made a big mistake, you ho.’

‘You don’t get to call me no hooker, you’re just a fucking waitress.’

She was trying to leave when Patty grabbed her hair. She spun round and struck Patty hard across the face.

‘I wish that killer would pick you,’ the waitress said.

Patty smiled.

‘Oh yeah?’

She had one fist clenched in the waitress’s uniform as she pulled her switchblade from her pocket and opened up her throat. The blade was still moving in the air as the waitress spurted blood on the wall, staggering round with her eyes popping. And Patty watched her fall, one hand on the floor, reaching for something she never found.

She stepped over the body and out of the diner and hailed a passing truck.

Jim went back the next day and heard the waitress had been killed by the maniac trucker.

Every time he took a piss there, he thought of the hot little tattooed thing he’d screwed, as the steam rose from the urinal like a mist.

PLATINUM BLONDE

by Richard Godwin

Platinum blonde slides through the door like sexual honey,

Hands me a nickel-plated pistol,

Burnished metal oozing sunlight, liquid gold

Her hair the color of chrome,

She bends as she lays it in my palm, that brief touch of skin,

Her body taut, ready, the endless distraction, and I fall between her lips,

But she is looking at me now,

Her eyes locked on mine like a deadbolt in a steel door

And I glance away from the curves

The seduction is clear,

It is the erotic graffiti of the aroused mind I see etched on the handle of the weapon

I knew it when she walked into the café

Her body says it all, the invitation is there

As she pulls a Zippo from her purse and whips it alight, touches it to the tip of a cigarette

And looks at the gun, assessing its ability to do the thing she craves

And I rack a bullet from the magazine while she blows blue smoke and I smell cordite

Her mouth is moist and perfume rises from her skin like the breath of Eros

As I aim the weapon.

Once her husband is gone

She will give me the blonde body

She will make me blonde through and through

Her body will wash me with pleasure

Her skin will slide like

Platinum across my flesh and flash like a steel plate,

Because she is ductile,

Malleable, more pliant than powder

And in her slick electric gesture

Is the glimpse of the flexible blonde, the cocaine ride to the dangerous high

And beneath it the sucker punch, the twisted gnarled hard knuckles of the hit

The one she gets me to do while she lies back, parted to the delicate petal

And I enter her bleached darkness, and I take her to beaten gold, enter

The sunshine of her lips dripping sap, sentient metal leaves sweating with pleasure

CRIMINAL MIND

Richard Godwin

The plot was calculating, viciously so, and as incisive as a cut-throat razor, but then Moriarty enjoyed intellectual savagery in his schemes. He needed to derive sadistic pleasure from the execution of his crimes. His use of Irene Adler and Mycroft was both ingenious and inhuman, a combination that pleased him well. And it was apparent that the genesis of the plan lay many years back in his childhood and early youth. In narrating the events that took place that year a brief glance at Moriarty’s past is salutary.

AETIOLOGY OF MORIARTY’S MIND.

There were two events that scarred his otherwise normal and well-tended childhood, and they bear close scrutiny since their shadows fall across the mastermind of the plot that concerns this narrative. They both involved his father and Moriarty would later look back on them as arguable reasons he became the man he did. Arguable, he would say, denying that events of such a nature held any sway over him. But they were without doubt the kind of events that shape a man’s character.

The first of these was the arrest of his father at their country house one year when Moriarty was eight years old. He remembered standing in the garden with a magnifying glass which he was using to burn the wings off a butterfly when the police officers arrived and carted his father away. The look on the elder Moriarty’s face would remain in his son’s mind for many years. He looked savage and tried to bite one of the officers. This normally mild mannered accountant who rarely spoke and often spent hours lost in his rare coin collection looked, that day, like a beast as they led him away and Moriarty thought he saw foam frothing on his father’s lips. And his father turned and glared at his son, as if he was responsible for what was taking place on his manicured lawn.

The reason for the arrest was never spoken of in front of the young Moriarty, who dreamed of wolves for several months after the event. He would awake at midnight and hear the hissing of waves on a distant shore and see the froth on his father’s mouth as he bared fangs at him, forcing Moriarty from his bed and sending him on idle tours of the cold house looking for clues to a mystery he couldn’t define.

The second event occurred many years later when the first had almost faded from his memory. His father was arrested again and tried for murder. It seemed that Moriarty had been raised by a man with a split personality. He read in the newspapers how his father would hunt the nocturnal streets of London in search of teenagers to kill. The pictures of his victims disturbed him. One of them, whom his father had eviscerated with a saw, resembled the young Moriarty. The discovery that his father was a murderer, coupled with the fact that Moriarty was now a teenager himself led him to the belief that his father wanted to kill him. As a parent he didn’t communicate with his son and never showed him any signs of affection. And Moriarty decided there and then he would deny entry to the idea that there was something rotten in him, that his father may have discerned some corruption in his character and been driven by an unconscious impulse to effect on others the thing he wished to do to his own flesh and blood. He dismissed him as a madman.

Moriarty soon began stealing things from his school, small, innocuous objects he later sold. He followed only intermittently his father’s conviction, losing interest in the case, or so he told himself. For Moriarty had, even at a young age, a limitless capacity to hide his motives behind a mountain of grandiose lies. He left school with the curious combination of a need to commit crime and a contempt for criminals. He thought about criminal acts with the kind of obsession some men have for women.

Moriarty’s massive intellect and corrupt character conspired to push him to extreme deeds. When he wasn’t studying and applying his considerable intellect to maths, his time at Durham University was spent analysing the weaknesses of his fellow students, and he performed psychological experiments on the hapless young women who fell under his sway. For he had huge sexual appetites and he despised women. A young student, Sarah Raft, tried to take her own life after an affair with him that left him hungry for a cruelty whose outlet he couldn’t find. And it was during his time at university that he formed the idea of how he would become the head of the criminal world of London.

Moriarty had met a thief among the student body, a man named Franklin Herringcroft, whom he had seen stealing money from a locker. Moriarty began to blackmail him into carrying out thefts for him, starting with the report about him that lay locked in a Professor’s drawer. It stated that he had exercised a pernicious influence over Sarah Raft, and that the university, while it respected Moriarty’s intellect, suspected him of being a destructive character. It went on to add that if any proof of how he had goaded the young woman to attempt to take her own life were brought forward he would be punished. Moriarty began to analyse Herringcroft’s character and the pleasure he took in theft. He wrote a long paper entitled, ‘Analysis of the Criminal Mind,’ which is now published and a well-respected criminological piece on the subject. And it occurred to Moriarty just how he could harness London’s criminal community to his control. He knew money was a great help, but Moriarty wanted to control their minds. It was as he was talking to Herringcroft one day that the idea came to him. They were standing in Herringcroft’s room and Moriarty was instructing him to steal Sarah Raft’s journal.

‘You will find it beneath her pillow,’ Moriarty said, ‘it is a simple theft.’

‘And what do you want with it?’

‘What I want with it is of no concern of yours. You will do as I instruct you.’

‘Sounds familiar. Her name.’

‘Does it?’

‘She’s the girl who tried to kill herself after an affair with you.’

‘Don’t complicate the task.’

‘She’s written something about you, hasn’t she?’

‘I think you’re forgetting something.’

‘What, that you’re blackmailing me? How could I?’

‘Then don’t let your mind run away with you.’

‘How much longer do I have to keep doing this?’

‘Herringcroft, what do you fear the most?’

‘Physical pain I imagine, like most men.’

‘Like this?’ Moriarty said.

Moriarty was standing next to the small fire that warmed the room and he gazed directly into Herringcroft’s uncomprehending eyes as he performed the act that led him to his brainwave that cold winter afternoon. Taking the poker and inserting it into the flame for a full minute he rolled up his sleeve and branded himself on the forearm, neither grimacing nor crying out, as the smell of charred flesh rose into the air. He laid the poker down and walked up to Herringcroft. Then Moriarty took him by the hand.

‘You’re bloody mad,’ Herringcroft said, ‘let go of my hand.’

‘Pain is in the mind and I am in your mind. Do you feel me squeeze your fingers?’

‘Yes, I think you’ve broken one of them. I’ll steal the journal, stop.’

‘I am not afraid of pain because I do not feel it. But if I do that to myself think of what I will do to you.’

‘All right, I’ve got it.’

‘Come to the fire.’

‘No, you made your point.’

‘Just a little singe.’

Moriarty forced Herringcroft’s hand into the flames and relished the scream he tore from the thief’s throat. As he let him go and saw the fear on his face, he knew. In that moment Moriarty realised that fear was the easiest way to influence a criminal mind. The criminal lived in fear of detection and arrest, of imprisonment and violence from his fellows, and so it was active in the character and all he needed to do was exert his influence. He would instill fear and then offer money, a simple combination that would harness them to his proposes. As Herringcroft looked at Moriarty that afternoon he seemed implacable, and he wondered if he would ever be rid of him. Moriarty, with his domed forehead and piercing gaze, was impossible to deny. And Herringcroft, with his small darting eyes and slender physique felt overwhelmed and helpless.

Herringcroft stole the journal that day and Moriarty effectively buried the evidence of what he’d done to Sarah Raft. But not before Herringcroft found out what it was she’d written about him. He had taken the journal to his room and pored over its contents, wanting to rid himself of Moriarty’s hold. And he found it half way through where she described her affair with Moriarty. She’d become pregnant by him and he forced her to abort it. The operation had been bungled and she was left sterile. When she discovered this she went to speak to him. This is the entry from her journal:

‘I stood in his room, the room where he’d seduced me and made love to me, and he began to laugh as I told him I was barren. The words he uttered will never leave me, I am sure, even when I am an old woman, an old childless woman. And it was the pleasure he took in saying them that hurt the most. “It was deliberate, I wanted to impregnate you to force you to an abortion that ensured you never conceived. The butcher I sent you to is a personal friend of mine. If I had merely mutilated you the pain would be less, and pain suits you, it matches your eyes. You may well find a career as a prostitute, I have no further uses for you.” I left, asking myself what manner of man I’d given myself to.’

Herringcroft wasted no time in using this to release himself from the blackmail Moriarty was using on him, threatening to tell the authorities of the university. And he was found dead in his room a few days later, with a knife buried in his neck. Moriarty had killed him and never fell under suspicion. A few days later Sarah Raft was found with a broken neck in the empty library. Moriarty left university with a first class degree and set about beginning his criminal career in earnest.

HURTING IRENE

The events the foregoing relate to, both in connection to Moriarty’s mind and his plot, took place some years later, when he had amassed enough money to begin his empire.

He took lodging at a house in Mayfair and hired a housekeeper, an elderly woman named Karen Tipp who was almost deaf, which pleased Moriarty. He didn’t want his conversations being overheard by a snooping maid. She was overweight and walked with a stooped gait, her eyes fixed on the floor, another attribute that gained her favour with her secretive employer.

He wasted no time in finding suitable men. Taking nocturnal walks in the East End of London he discovered burglars at work, and began his poisonous blackmail. Threatening to report them to the police, Moriarty employed them to steal items of use to him. Then he told them he would protect them and paid them for their compliancy. There was one thief he favoured, a small and lithe man name Harold Falmer. One thing in particular Moriarty was after were the police files on Irene Adler. He’d seen her at a party some months previously and admired her beauty. He also suspected she was hiding something and considered her of great use to him.

As she stood beneath a chandelier in a figure hugging satin dress, all eyes on her in the room full of the wealthy and the louche, her diamond earrings sparkling, but not as brightly as her erotic eyes, Moriarty looked appreciatively at her. There was a flicker of desire in him then and an equal recognition that they were incompatible, since she would never yield to his will. She was full of a carnal knowing that told him instantly what kind of creature she was in bed. He’d met her kind before, but she was a highly evolved specimen. The complete absence of self-consciousness in her as she returned Moriarty’s gaze aroused him. There in that room of social frivolity, in the house he had only visited to see her, he thought of tearing the satin from her skin and violating her, the way he had raped Sarah Raft’s mind. But he had other ideas for Irene. And so he resolved to destroy her, using sex as the weapon that would lure her to the trap. She stirred up memories of Sarah Raft, memories that excited Moriarty. She slid into his plan that night like a broken bone snapping back into place. And she fitted the theory he had, one that was at once astute and subversive.

He believed that every detective had a criminal mind. Moriarty had met Pierre Janet in Paris and studied Mesmerism heavily. He’d developed a theory that a good police investigator had effectively split from his own criminality, and Moriarty believed we are all criminal at heart. The law was for cowards, and morality a sham. He thought Sherlock Holmes was a moral fraud, a criminal at heart who had solved crimes by connecting with his split self. Moriarty was in many ways ahead of Carl Jung and his theories of the shadow. It is arguable that his discovery of his father’s double life and secret crimes led to this hypothesis of the fractured self. He decided to test his theory. He’d been studying Mycroft and considered him a good target, a man with a strong intellect. And he and his interfering brother stood in Moriarty’s way if he were to take control of London.

The evening it all came together in his mind Moriarty was eating a rare steak in the dining room of his house. He watched the blood pool at the edge of his plate with satisfaction as he knew he had it. Mycroft was a lamb, and he’d make him into a filthy lamb. He drank from his glass of claret and thought of Irene’s body. He imagined her sexual practices at her establishment, a tidy affair where she presided over the weak men who paid her for their pleasures. And while he admired Irene for the way she tricked Holmes over the photograph of the King of Bohemia, the idea of using her in his murderous and erotic plan worked like an aphrodisiac in his loins.

His man returned to him with the police papers on her and he studied them with delight. Irene had been arrested on two occasions, once for the attempted poisoning of a wealthy businessman who she claimed tried to rape her, the other for suspected prostitution. Both times the case was closed. The businessman dropped the charges since he feared scandal. The prostitution allegations didn’t hold. Of the fact that she was a whore Moriarty had no doubt. There were keys in here, keys to her character. He’d known she was dominant at the party. He also believed the rape charge was true. So to turn her into a killer was an easy matter. And while the idea of raping her himself was appealing, he would hire the shadow man to do it for him and kill three at the same time. He already had the actor for the part, and he looked just like him.

THE TARGET

The year was 1900.

The man Moriarty sent to hurt her was called Samuel Croft, and he was Mycroft’s double. Moriarty had discovered him on one of his nocturnal walks and the echo of Mycroft’s name in the criminal’s pleased Moriarty in its irony, as if he had encountered a diminished version of Mycroft. He saw Samuel Croft beating up another man in an alley. He was kicking him in the ribs as Moriarty watched and saw the likeness to Mycroft. He approached him as he walked away, wiping blood from his knuckles, and was staggered close up at the resemblance.

Croft turned and glared at Moriarty. The street was deserted and Moriarty held him in his gaze as Croft pulled a dagger from his belt.

‘Want some of this do you?’

‘You’re not going to stab me.’

‘You saw what I did to that fella. What makes you think I won’t do it to you?’

‘I’ll show you why.’

The blow was like lightning. Moriarty chopped him in the Adam’s apple. He kicked him in the groin and Croft buckled, as Moriarty brought his knee up into his face. Then Moriarty kicked his legs from under him and Croft fell to the pavement gasping for air. Moriarty leaned over him.

‘Now you listen to me, you’re going to do a job for me and I’m going to pay you for it,’ Moriarty said, ‘it’s a job you will enjoy.’

‘What job?’

‘Recover your breath and I’ll buy you some of that opium you are clearly enamoured of.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You have dilated pupils and you’re withdrawing, you were trying to steal money off your fellow pugilist weren’t you?’

‘He didn’t have any on him.’

‘Stand up and you will get your opium and money, a lot of it, then you will do as I instruct you.’

‘And what if I don’t?’ Croft said, staggering to his feet.

‘Then I will show you that what you just experienced was not real pain,’ Moriarty said, moving so close to Croft that he could feel his cold breath on his face.

And so Moriarty hired Croft. He gave him cash to buy opium and told him what he was to do, explaining that the £100 was only half the fee and that if he executed the task to his satisfaction he would get another £100. Moriarty examined him and found him to be every inch the likeness of Mycroft. The problem was Croft was working class and sounded nothing like him, but in the right clothes no one would know.

‘You’ll have to shave off your moustache,’ Moriarty said, ‘and do not speak at all, say nothing to her, simply make sure she gets a good look at you as you go in.’

And so one Friday evening Croft ventured to the establishment where Irene Adler conducted her business. The appointment had been arranged through a series of elaborately penned and coded letters. Moriarty suspected that Irene had always feared Holmes may try to pit himself against her again. And he was sure that she would know what Mycroft looked like, since she frequented many of the parties he sometimes attended.

Croft went there dressed in clothes Moriarty picked out for him, a simple pin stripe suit in the style he had seen Mycroft wear. He looked just like Mycroft as he rang the bell and waited in the gathering fog in the street. She answered the door in a low cut black satin dress and almost took his breath way. He had to clench his hand on the banisters to remind himself what he was there to do and what Moriarty would do to him if he failed to carry it out. She led him into the bedroom and Croft stared at the sheets pulled back on the bed and her standing there with that look in her eyes. It was a glance of such sexual intent he almost felt afraid to touch her. He ran his eyes down her body and licked his lips. She was voluptuous in every sense of the word and on offer. His hunger for her then was as fierce as his need for opium and somewhere in his mind they became fused as she spoke, trying to coax him into words. Her attempt to get him to speak was almost more erotic than the thought of what he was about to do to this intensely beautiful sexual woman who existed in a world of which he had no cognizance. And for a moment he felt as though he’d gone to the wrong house because Moriarty’s instructions made no sense.

‘I never thought I’d see you here as a client,’ Irene Adler said.

Her voice was so clear and of such a higher class that it scared Croft. He almost spoke, wanting to know who it was she mistook him for, to discover what Moriarty was using him for. He had never felt so aroused by a woman before and he weighed up which was greater, his desire for her or his fear for Moriarty. And the answer was obvious.

She was standing by the window, her hands resting on the sill, the curtains were drawn behind her and the light caught her face as he walked towards her. She was almost too beautiful to do it to and Croft had to remind himself what Moriarty had threatened to do if he failed to carry it out as he came up to her and gazed into her face and she looked back at him with a flicker of suspicion.

‘You’re not particularly talkative are you?’ she said.

He laid his hands around her throat and began to choke her. Then Croft tore her dress from her shoulders and began to undo his trousers. Irene reached behind her and grabbed a table lamp. She brought it crashing down on his head. Croft threw her to the floor and began to get on top of her but Irene rolled away from him and ran into the hall. He followed her but when he got out of the bedroom he found her standing bare breasted holding a pistol. The sight of her breasts momentarily distracted him from the weapon, and he wondered if she would fire, if he could commit the sexual act he’d been sent there to, and then one look in her eyes told him she would. Croft ran out of the building and heard the single shot. The bullet whizzed past his shoulder and then he was in the street protected by the fog.

Irene Adler adjusted her dress and ran after him but it was impossible to see. And so she went up to the living room and poured herself a large glass of cognac. Then she made a telephone call. That night she hired a man named Harry Wrinkler, a paid killer, and she arranged to meet him the next day and pay him half his fee for the murder of Mycroft.

This was what Moriarty had intended to happen. He had not expected Croft to fail, and when Croft did not report back to him he went in search of him. He found him at his lodging and Croft told him what had happened. He said she had a gun and would have killed him but he would go back and do it. Croft’s body was found a few days later. Moriarty had stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife.

By this time Harry Wrinkler was paid and preparing for the assassination of Mycroft. Once Mycroft was out of the way Irene Adler would take out a second contract on Holmes, blaming him for the actions of his brother. Moriarty had already written the letter informing her of how Holmes had steered his brother her way, it was a simple matter of posting it. The target was Holmes, it had always been Holmes, but Moriarty wanted them all removed. He would then ensure Irene Adler was convicted for murder and executed.

INFORMANTS AND SPIES

It was a clear day in London as Harry Wrinkler readied himself to kill Mycroft. To him it was just another job and he thought about the money and the smell of the cash. He had cleaned his Martini-Henry rifle the night before and now he sat with his feet up on his kitchen table eating biscuits and waited until 10:00AM, the hour designated for the assassination. He knew Mycroft would pass by a house on Baker Street near to his brother’s address, on his way to a meeting. He had secured a room in a lodging from which he had the perfect angle to take his head off and leave by a back entrance before the origin of the shot was detected. Then it was a simple matter of collecting the rest of his money. He had heard things about his employer, and he entertained the idea of spending some of the money on her body, a thought that helped him pass the time.

Harry Wrinkler was a tall, lean man with a muscular physique he’d gained from his years in the army. He had dark hair, dead eyes, wore a permanently mistrustful expression, and had an angry scar that travelled the length of his chin like a white comma. Moriarty pictured him clearly as he finished his morning tea. He’d placed him in Irene Adler’s lap some months ago, in the initial stages of his plan to kill Holmes, when he’d replied to an ad she’d placed in The Times. It was a coded request for intelligence of a killer and he’d placed her in touch with Wrinkler. A few weeks later a businessman had been shot, no doubt a man who had done something to Irene. Moriarty had used Wrinkler on occasion. He had placed them all under surveillance for months, gathering information through his network of criminal informants. He glanced at his watch. Soon he would make his way to the café from which he’d watch the execution over coffee. As he sat there the door opened.

‘Will there be anything else, Sir?’ Karen Tipp said.

‘No, I’ll be going out shortly.’

‘Very good, Sir, will you want me to make you lunch? And for what time?’

‘I ought to be back by one.’

‘One it is, Sir.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, you have a letter.’

He followed her out into the hall and opened the envelope with the paper knife he’d sharpened to a razor. It was a bill from his wine merchant, but the amount was wrong, he’d overcharged him, and this irritated Moriarty. It would have to wait. He laid it down on the table and went to get his coat.

Then he left his house and walked to Baker Street, moving quickly and with ease, thinking of the events that would transpire that day. He got to the café at 9:45AM and waited with a cup of coffee. He had a good view of the street outside and watched the passers-by. Then he saw Mycroft. He watched him walk towards the house where Wrinkler waited with his rifle. Suddenly Mycroft turned and left Baker Street. Moriarty stood and gazed at his retreating back.

In the cold bedroom where Wrinkler waited he sought for an explanation. He’d seen Mycroft, but he had not got close enough for him to shoot him. Then he walked off in another direction. Maybe the target had forgotten something. He gave it fifteen minutes then he packed his rifle away.

Wrinkler went out onto the landing and began to walk down the stairs, thinking the assassination had been discovered. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and found himself propelled head long down to the ground floor. He smashed his head on the stone tiles. Mycroft came down after him, looked at the blood pooling around his head, adjusted his tie, and left the house by the back door, passing Moriarty in the café and waving at him, as Moriarty bit his lip.

And so Moriarty returned home, his mind racing to understand how his plan had been foiled. As he entered the hallway Karen Tipp came out of the kitchen.

‘You have a visitor, Sir,’ he said.

‘A visitor?’

‘Yes, Sir. He’s in the living room.’

‘I wasn’t expecting anyone.’

Karen Tipp gave him a rather curious look and Moriarty thought he could smell alcohol on her breath, but then she didn’t drink, and so he dismissed his notion. He went into the living room, wondering who had visited him at this hour, imagining one of his criminals had come to borrow money. As he closed the door he realised what had happened this morning and why his plan had failed. There, standing by the fire, was Sherlock Holmes.

‘Ah, Holmes, I expected you today,’ Moriarty said.

‘No you didn’t, you didn’t expect any of today’s events,’ Holmes said.

‘You like to think of yourself as able to read me. But you have never been able to penetrate my mind, not for a single instance.’

‘Oh really? I can think of quite a few of them.’

‘Give me one then.’

‘Your plan was easy to spot.’

‘What plan?’

‘To get my brother killed.’

‘You stumbled on it, that is all, admit it, you must have seen Wrinkler.’

‘I read the letter you wrote to Irene Adler in response to her ad.’

‘Impossible.’

‘A simple interception, I have contacts in the Mail. I understood instantly what you were planning and returned the letter to the Mail as if it had never been opened.’

‘You couldn’t have predicted from that what I was going to do.’

‘Of course I could, it was elementary. Would you like me to tell you how?’

‘I think it’s unlikely I am going to stop you.’

‘The fact that you involved yourself in her request for information could only have one motive: you wanted to embroil her in a plot against me. I knew you wouldn’t use the direct approach, id est openly involve me, but you would use the next best thing, namely my brother. And so it became apparent you were plotting to use Irene Adler to kill me and I surmised also Mycroft, since you are overwhelmingly greedy.’

‘How did you know the manner of assassination I had planned?’

‘Mycroft has many shadowy contacts as you know, he made some inquiries among the criminal classes. Wrinkler talks when he drinks, he gave away details.’

‘And how did I motivate Irene Adler to want to get your brother killed?’

‘You have a spy in your house.’

‘What?’

‘Karen Tipp, she does a good job. She is neither deaf nor stooped as you will see in a few moments I imagine, although she does like to drink, but nonetheless she proved to be an excellent source of information. I placed her here, you see, when you placed an ad for a housekeeper I ensured you got the type of woman you wanted, namely one you thought would not discover any of your activities. She is good at listening at doorways. She heard you instructing Croft. It was easy for me to realise what you had planned then. You see, I am one step ahead of you, Moriarty, and I always will be.’

‘And what makes you think that?’

‘Because I do not have a criminal mind.’

‘I’ll outsmart you, Holmes.’

‘You won’t because your mind is riddled with vanity.’

‘You say you placed her?’

‘Karen Tipp? Yes I did and you never suspected a thing.’

‘You think you can get away with this?’

‘I believe I just have.’

Just then the front door slammed and Moriarty went over to the window to see Karen Tipp walking briskly away with two bottles of wine in her hand.

‘She’s also a thief,’ Moriarty said.

‘She packed her things earlier, you won’t find her if you mean to do her harm.’

‘It was a good plan. I imagine Irene Adler will attribute the failure of the assassination to you, she may well come after you.’

‘I wrote to Irene and explained to her you were behind it all, and had hired a lookalike. I think she may well pay you a visit, she’s expert in the use of poisons.’

‘What makes you so sure she believed you?’

‘She’s presently having lunch with Mycroft.’

‘Maybe she will eat him for her second course.’

‘I think they get along. Oh, by the way, as I waited for you I glanced at your paper on the criminal mind. It’s rather good, in parts. You miss key points, but no time to chat now.’

‘Whether you like it or not Holmes, you have a criminal mind or you would not have discovered what I was planning, there will be future chess games.’

‘No, I dissect the criminal mind. I imagine your need to commit crimes lies in your childhood. I believe your father’s activities have formed the split in you. It was tragic what you did to Sarah Raft, I read about it and concluded it was your doing, and of course your use of Irene Adler is connected to that and to the perversion in your character. Good day.’

Holmes left. As Wrinkler’s dead body was discovered by a tenant of the house, Moriarty went into the hall. He looked again at the bill from his wine merchant and crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. Then he went into the kitchen to see if he had some lunch. Karen Tipp had cooked some stew and as he looked at the gelatinous film on its surface, Moriarty though about what Holmes had said about Irene Adler and he tipped it into the dustbin.

He opened a bottle of claret, poured himself a glass, and went into the living room. As he stood by the window he bit his lip, and putting his hand to his mouth saw blood.

ROTHKO’S DAUGHTER

Richard Godwin

I followed her, having nowhere else to go. She was shining like a wax doll under the bus shelter lights, looking like she’d melt. I sat down next to her and lit a Marlboro, feeling the drops of rain crawl down my face like insects.

“Has the last one been?” I said.

“The last bus left a long time ago,” she whispered.

A woman like her exists only in metaphor. She converted reality as easily as I picked pockets.

I looked at the money I’d stolen from Hank. I didn’t want to go back to the flat. I was running out of time that night, tired of seeing the same faces. The crowd I knew conformed to the idea of a rebellious life. We all propped up each others’ lies. And I felt exposed. Even my walk had the soiled predictability of a thief.

My reflection in the shelter sickened me. I stole a glance at her, wondering what her name was. She had a defiled mystery about her. Even now, I consider her iconic.

“Didn’t I see you the other night in the club?” I said.

“You mean Mirage?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“I remember kissing you.”

“You do?”

She leaned towards me.

“I could use some downers.”

We listened to the rain washing the pavements, just two users with mutual recognition between us as midnight fell beyond the hollow rooftops. Nothing seemed real in those days, the small corner of London I inhabited looked like a stage set. Everyone I knew was a facade, an empty mouth muttering words that made no sense anymore. It was all about to change.

“I know where I could score some,” she said. “Don always has good gear.”

She put her faded denim jacket over her head and we ran through the sodden streets, stopping outside an electrical shop. She pressed the intercom and we were buzzed in.

I followed her up some stairs to a studio. Don was standing in the middle of the room surrounded by clear plastic bags with pills in them. Clothes were strewn everywhere. There were two large frames on the wall which were turned round so their backs were facing forward. Someone had written “Do not reflect me” on the back of one in bright pink ink. Don was wearing only a pair of silver trousers. There were two long gashes on his chest. He’d been crying and his mascara had run.

“That bastard did this to me, Sam’s been screwing around again.”

“You need to get that looked at,” she said.

“By who? My injuries can’t be assessed by a doctor. I’m losing my definition by the day. What do you see when you look at me?”

She laid her hand on his shoulder.

“I see my friend, Don.”

“We trade. That’s all we do. I know about being used, I know what it feels like to be a hole.” He started removing his lipstick with a dirty rag. “We’re all strangers, peer behind the veneer. We make ourselves up until we can’t anymore.”

She walked over to one of the frames and turned it round.

“Look at yourself in the mirror,” she said.

Don raised a hand.

“I don’t want to see him.”

“Who?”

“That person claiming to be me.”

“Look at your chest.”

“No.”

“You don’t want to get an infection.”

“We’re all infected. Take me naked as I am.”

“You’ll get scars.”

“Then I’ll make sure everyone sees them, what he did to me.”

His gut wobbled as he wandered across the room and struggled into a Miami shirt.

She cupped her hand over my ear.

“He self-harms, Sam ran away years ago.”

I watched as Don rummaged through a drawer, lifting out forks and holding them up to the light. He laid them down on a small table, then picked a bag up from the floor. I handed him the cash and he passed me the downers.

“What’s with the forks?” I said.

Don tossed his hair back.

“Who is this guy?”

She pecked him on the cheek, and I followed her outside.

“We could go to my place and sleep, I found some tins of soup,” she said.

“Found?”

“In an open van.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Florence. You?”

“Jack.”

On the way there I kept thinking she didn’t look like Florence. I knew all about the city of art, and I thought she was trying to dignify herself in some way. I’d never kissed her until that night. She made it up, the scene at the club. I liked that sense of corruption about her. She was well within my grasp.

Her one room flat stood over a hardware store and smelt of stale air and cheap perfume. The walls were lined with pictures. I looked at one in which she was tattooing an enormous man.

“That was a big piece,” she said.

“You’re a tattoo artist?”

“I own my own parlour.”

“You’re good.”

She slapped me on the chest.

“Hey, that’s how I can pay you back, Jack. I can give you a tattoo.”

We took the downers and smoked dope.

She waved her arm in the direction of the tiny kitchen area.

“Help yourself to some food.”

Her fridge contained a bottle of Smirnoff and a slice of rotting cheddar. I found two buckled tins of tomato soup in a cupboard full of light bulbs.

“I know where I can get you some crack,” I said.

She was lying on the floor, and she looked at me with the momentary hope of the damned. I knew the look. It existed in the faces of all the sad women I’d exchanged for one another.

I studied the pictures as the downers kicked in.

“I’ve been doing it for years,” she said. “I’m good with needles.”

“You really are, these are some of the best tattoos I’ve seen. You should be famous.”

There were tears in her eyes as she stood up.

“Do you want to know a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I’m Rothko’s daughter.”

“You mean the artist?”

“Yeah, him.”

She shoved a heavy book across the floor. I opened it and stared at the images. They just looked like lines of paint on squares. I’d always thought that kind of art was a con, aimed at all the pretentious people who have soirees, fuck each other’s wives, and talk about which plays they go to.

“I’m part Russian,” Florence said.

“Florence Rothko. It has a ring to it.”

She shook her head.

“Florence Dimes. My mother was a nightclub entertainer, she was so beautiful he couldn’t resist her.”

“You mean a stripper?”

“No, a cabaret artist, she was sophisticated, Jack.”

“Have you ever been to a soiree?”

“I did once, I had this dress.”

She made a gesture with her hands. Her eyes were heavy, and she stumbled to the floor. I looked at her lying against the sofa, her face broken and lost.

“Did I tell you about the time he took me to New York?”

“No.”

“I’ll show you the pictures. That’s where I get it from, my ability with needles.”

“You must have it in your veins.”

“What?”

“His artistic temperament.”

“That’s it, Jack, you understand me. My skin’s a canvas. The first time I got a tattoo, I thought, this is the real meaning of penetration. The needle’s entering my body, but it’s leaving something beautiful behind.”

She shut her eyes. I could see them dart around beneath her eyelids as she slept. I’d watched her sleep before on the night bus, dozing against the window. I followed her on. Her bag lay open beside her on the broken seat. I stole her phone to ring my dealer and listened to her messages. There was a long one from a guy called Mick.

“You’re a hideous fraud,” he said.

Then he yelled so much he made my ear ache and I threw her phone across the street, where it smashed against a lamp post. I was out of pills that night. I remember falling asleep at the back of a shop selling futons, seeing her face, wanting more from her. I lied about seeing her in the club, I’d never even been to Mirage. I lied to her about most things. That was what I liked about her the most, she was such a willing accomplice.

I studied her on the floor of her littered flat. I didn’t understand her, I didn’t care. I just wanted to watch my wax doll melt. Her skin had the pallor of an icon. She didn’t deserve to have that. She was no better than me. I wanted to show her who she was.

I read the book about her famous father. It talked about his theories and how he was influenced by Nietzsche. It said Rothko died in 1970, which would have made him in his late sixties when he impregnated her mother. I slammed the book shut and woke her. She took a pair of retro glasses out of her bag and put them on. They made her look middle aged. She began looking for something in a drawer as I took my shoes off and went over to the bed. A picture of a man with slicked back hair stared at me out of a corroded silver frame.

“That’s my ex,” she said. “The asshole, he never gave me any money when he left and now he’s shacked up with some bird.”

“A man like that can’t appreciate an artist like you.”

“Jack, that’s exactly right.”

She fished a CD out of the drawer and put it on.

“Do you like Edith Piaf?”

“I was reading about your father.”

“You know he struggled with the label of abstract painter? He said it was like arguing with your parents, that in the end you have to recognise your roots.”

“People in that world talk bullshit. I know, my old man’s an art critic.”

“That’s not the same, critics prey on artists. Rothko hated and distrusted them. They think they can define people, and tell us what makes great art, but they don’t understand it.”

“Rothko might have thought we’re connected to our roots, but I’m nothing like my father.”

“Maybe not in the way you think you are, but it will come out in some other way. Look at me and the needles I paint with. Rothko’s alive in my tattoos. It’s all about perception, Jack. Painters show us the way the world really is. You can spend your life not seeing anything, not knowing who anyone really is, because that exists beneath the skin. Did your father really understand art? Could he see someone for what they are, for their unspoken beauty?”

“He belonged to this sick crowd of people who looked down their noses at everyone else. They had their own private little language, just so you knew you were excluded.”

“Do you think he loved you?”

I thought about the last time I’d seen him, and the look in his eyes when he found out I’d been stealing.

“There was a lot of fraud surrounding Rothko, that’s one of the reasons I don’t like the art world.”

“That was caused by businessmen ripping him off.”

“Why do you think he killed himself?”

“He was misunderstood. He said a painting is permanently impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.”

“A painting doesn’t feel anything, it’s an object.”

“I know what unfeeling eyes can do, Jack.”

I looked at her and she was crying, lost in the music, and I held her for a while as she rocked on her little feet. She looked up at me with her mouth half open and I tasted her deceit as she bit my lip and we fell onto the bed. Then I was wiping the tears and the past away as I waited for the dark.

The next morning she said, “Come and get a tattoo, Jack.” She handed me her card.

I had no intention of seeing her again. I felt she was tricking me.

I went back to the flat. Hank had gone, taken everything. He’d left me a note.

“Thieves like you belong on the street,” it read.

I had a few clothes in a wardrobe. They smelt dank and I stood there trying to remember if Florence had a washing machine. I put them in a black bin liner and looked at the unpaid bills. I couldn’t afford the rent. I wanted to move on from the whole stinking place and most of all myself.

I thought I might run into one of the crowd at The Fox and find a place for the night. Instead I saw her ex there. I recognised him from the picture. He was snogging a young blonde guy and I wondered if he’d turned gay after leaving Florence. I began to feel better about myself, having this piece of information. I knew more about her life than she did.

That Saturday afternoon I went to the tattoo parlour, half expecting it not to be there. She was behind the counter reading Grazia magazine in the empty shop.

She led me through to the back and I took my shirt off and sat in the chair.

“I figure I’ll get my right arm done,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

“You’ll see.”

It hurt, but not as much as losing my self-respect. The pain felt like some physical absolution, and the fact that she was administering it to me filled me with the urge to vandalise her shop. I looked at her face as she stared intently down at her work. The skin was hard beneath her observant eyes. I wanted to ask her about her gay husband. I wanted to find something to hate about her.

I didn’t look at it until she finished. She’d drawn a series of lines across a box.

“What is it?”

“It’s a Rothko. It’s called Magenta, Black.”

“I thought you’d do something like a woman or an animal.”

“This is better, don’t you see, it’s worth a lot of money, you’ve got a replica by Rothko’s daughter.”

“If I ever need to score I can just hack my arm off and sell it to the nearest art dealer.”

She took my head in her hands.

“Don’t say that, don’t ever say that. I want to be your lover, I need your arms around me, but I’ve got something missing inside.”

She was beautiful and displaced, like a stolen stained glass window, and her body was alive with the kind of sexual disease that turned me on instantly. I held her in my arms as she swayed there in the parlour, the sound of cars hissing on the road outside, and I knew she was an invention. That was what we had in common, our lies. She really was good with needles.

“Do you want to come back with me?” she said. “I’m closing up now.”

“I haven’t got any pills.”

She looked down at the black bin liner. There was a rip in it and a shirt sleeve stuck out.

“You’ve brought a bag, Jack.”

“Just some clothes.”

She smiled and I felt like washing. I didn’t want to go back with her. I had vertigo in that shop as I glimpsed what I could feel about her if I stayed around. But I needed a place for the night.

She lay down when we got to her flat, and propped her head up on her hand. A lot of her postures looked copied from paintings. I knew all about forgery and theft. That was why I spent those soiled days with her.

“You can put your things on the sofa,” she said.

I felt sad for her then. There can be no permanence for people like us.

“I saw your ex kissing a guy.”

She sat up.

“What?”

“He’s gay.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“No, it was him all right.”

She started pacing the room.

“Do you know what that bastard said to me? That I knew shit about art. Me!”

“Screw him.”

“Let’s go there now.”

We did. To a derelict basement a few miles away.

He opened the door in a pair of grey Jockeys and said, “I haven’t got any.”

“I don’t want money, Mick.”

Florence pushed him aside and marched into the flat. He chased after her and I walked in and watched them fight in the filthy corridor.

“Who you living with?” she said.

“Why do you want to know?”

He had his hands on his hips and she looked over his shoulder into the room behind him.

“Huh,” she said, “huh.”

There was a young man in the bed, I could see his chest above the sheet. He had this pug face and he kept blinking.

“Too afraid of women now, Mick?” Florence said.

“After you.”

She began to march down the corridor towards the front door.

“Come on Jack.”

“Even your orgasms are forgeries,” Mick shouted after her.

We headed to the nearest bar.

She sat there drinking Martinis, feigning sophistication on stolen money, a tattooed scar on the edge of the broken street.

“Why does it matter?” I said.

“Why does what matter?”

“The fact he’s gay, he’s not with you anymore.”

“But he’s not gay, this is all an act put on to make me feel bad, to go back to him.”

“Do you think he’d go to those lengths?”

“People do go to lengths Jack, we all want to be seen in a certain way.”

“What lengths do you go to, Florence?”

“The lengths I need.”

We left the bar and travelled back to her flat.

I felt trapped as she closed the door. She came right up to me so her face was inches from mine. I held her, and she was someone else then in the twilight that fell beyond the window. I searched for her eyes in the room, but she kept them closed, as if the world was too much for her to bear and she wanted to dream. What it was she dreamed I don’t know. All I know was that as she touched me and I kissed her face she was shivering. She pushed her hips towards me and gasped.

“I want a baby.”

“Do you think your daughter would be like Rothko too?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

I tried lying, saying all the things she needed me to say. But my face felt like a mask in the dark and I wanted to pull it away and bleed on her, shock her, stop the game that she played better than me. As I tasted the despair in her mouth, I wondered what hatred felt like when it was too old to be born, and lay there inside you holding on like an ancient foetus. I wondered what I’d be like in ten years. And I thought that if she carried my child we’d have to abort it. I’d have to make sure it never saw daylight.

I thought about the time I looked in her handbag while she was sleeping on the bus and that is what it felt like then, inside her as she lay with her eyes shut dreaming of Rothko, conjuring lies. I’d watched her that night at the pale yellow bus shelter. I listened to her talking on her phone. I felt excluded from her conversation. I studied her, so when we spoke it felt natural. That was the advantage I enjoyed. I used to spy on lives and remove things from people I felt they shouldn’t own.

I looked at the Rothko she’d inked on my arm as she slept. I was trying to steal money from her purse when she woke.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“Looking for pills.”

“I haven’t got any.”

She got up and pulled on some clothes.

“You were looking for cash.”

“We all steal things, Florence.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You’ve stolen who you are.”

She began to punch me with tiny fists and I stood there laughing until she crumpled sobbing to the floor.

“Why don’t you put that song on?”

“Do you know why I do tattoos?”

“It’s your art.”

She stood up and rubbed her eyes.

“That’s right.”

“What does it feel like being Rothko’s daughter?”

“Unwanted and alone.”

“But it must be a buzz.”

“How can you say that?”

“You’re famous.”

“I’m not.”

“They could write books about you.”

“They don’t write books about people like me.”

“You could be a painter.”

“My tattoos hide scars. That’s why I got the first one, down here, deep down here, to hide it. Then I got more, because I keep seeing scars everywhere, I want to cover my whole body with tattoos. Don’t you think skin’s disgusting? I don’t want to be a physical object. I want to be one huge Rothko then people can look at me and see.”

“See what?”

“What I really am.”

“Everyone has skin, Florence.”

“Rothko’s canvas was his skin.”

“What are the scars?”

“Oh, you should know.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re stained like me.”

“Yeah, sure.”

She told the truth in a figurative way, the literal was lost on her. The meanings she conveyed felt like tiny fish hooks entering me.

“I’m scarred, I need to be tattooed inside.”

“Like you need a baby?”

“I’m told I’ll never have one.”

I looked at her standing there, and saw how young she was.

“You’re not really his daughter are you?”

“How can you say that?”

“You’ve made yourself look older.”

“Are you nuts?”

I picked up her glasses from the night table.

“These have clear lenses in them, you don’t need them. You’d have to be ancient to be his, and you’re not.”

“Get out, get out,” she said.

I was going.

Then, as I was by the door she said, “They never wanted me. They never even used to touch me afterwards.”

I was holding her for hours before she let me get away. She clutched onto my jacket with mascara stained fingers and left a print there. It was still there the day I burnt it like a soiled memento.

Florence’s real parents had given her away. She told me stuff about her childhood I never want to recall, things that made me hate desire. She asked me for things I would never be able to give and reminded me what I was. She was naked without her lie. I left her at the parlour that night as she began to cover the rest of her body with tattoos.

“Do you understand now?” she said.

“Why Rothko? Why pick him? It could have been any artist.”

“Because he’s abstract. The truth isn’t reality. He colours my stains. He allows me to forget.”

“There are other abstract painters. It was a movement.”

“Did your father give you that information?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“What else did he give you, Jack?”

“Nothing.”

“Is that why you have to steal?”

“We’re all trying to take a piece of ourselves back.”

“You’ve stripped me to the bone.”

“I think he would have liked you.”

That was the best I could come up with. As I closed the door she was staring down at her skin with incredulity.

I expected to read about her in the papers, having died from some weird ink poisoning, an indecipherable portrait of suffering by the roadside.

I moved on, but I couldn’t erase her memory. I called her at the parlour a few months later, and Florence stayed in touch over the years. She took up painting. She married a guy I used to know. He told her he was an art dealer. I asked him to tell her the truth, I didn’t want to know more about her life than she did. She discovered he was dealing drugs when he went to prison. She had several miscarriages and an exhibition called The Meaning of Skin. I got an invitation but I never went. I didn’t want to remember who I used to be.

Many years before I met her, I once tried to steal a painting from a gallery. The guard saw me lifting it off the wall, and I ran away. It was by an artist who’d been well reviewed by my father. I thought I could sell it, and get some cash for drugs. I despised the art world. I wanted to gatecrash it and bring it down. Those days I spent with Florence changed that. She removed my desire to trespass in others’ lives.

For a while that left me with nothing. I went to visit my father. I hired a suit and listened to him talk about the art world. I’d gone there with a speech prepared about what my life had been. I wanted to make an admission. But all he did was talk, stealing my opportunity. As I was leaving, he asked me what I did. I told him I owned a paint factory and a yacht.

“Are you interested in art?” he said.

“I knew Rothko’s daughter.”

“Kate?”

“No, Florence.”

“I didn’t know he had a daughter called Florence.”

“You didn’t know you had a son called Jack.”

He went off to look for an article he’d written which he wanted to show me and I drove away. All the way back to my small flat I tasted the bitter root of hypocrisy. I thought of how I hid from Florence, and exposed her as a forgery. And I realised in doing so I’d robbed myself.

She OD’d soon after her exhibition. She’d lost her home. Some kids found her body in an alley. They were taking pictures of her tattooed legs when the police came.

I still carry the small Rothko she left me with. An art dealer, a real art dealer I sold some coke to years later said it was a good representation. Florence was a metaphor for too many things. I still remember her for showing me the complex beauty of deceit.

TIME CRAWLING BACK AGAINST THE GLASS

Richard Godwin

I inhabit the ice, the frozen zone, the nowhere place, time crawling back against the glass. I sometimes think I am looking for insects but they stole my memory, they stole time.

Chicago. It’s winter. I’m losing my memory. The alliance will move me on soon.

Cars are frozen solid, women scurry by the blocks of iced metal, hiding their skins from the cold. Skin has a price. Even yours. Only the skinless now, lost among museum pieces solid in the snow, artefacts of a bygone era, men and women prone to certain habits and more revealing lies. I watch you as you sleep my humble tired nation. I am the gravity pull of the outsider.

I’m opposite Millennium Park and I ask myself what I’m doing here. There are no answers in the bottles of Jim Beam and Twinkie wrappers that litter the apartment. I pull down my eyelids and stare at my face in the tarnished mirror. You never know where your next job is coming from.

Identity is the lost mirror and I am humble in my relief. I wish you would like to understand words more than me. Even me with my lost empire and illusions of a tattered soldier at the end of a long march. Change is everywhere even among the replicant ants, those men and women down on the street below. I will talk to them. Those men.

I’m stepping out of the shower when the door buzzes. Frankie’s standing there with his briefcase. He walks in, sits down, slings a cowboy boot over his Wrangler jeans, and pops a strawberry Zinger in his mouth. He pauses. He always pauses, it is a tired and predictable part of the routine of a thug in a businessman’s clothes, frayed at the edges, they are all frayed at the edges like time, my lost brother of sorrow.

‘So Harry, ready for the next one?’ Frankie says.

He slides a picture of a fat man eating a lollipop across the stained coffee table. It has the usual details on the back, address, schedule of target’s movements.

‘Usual payment?’ I say.

Frankie nods.

His nod is like the cold breath of a salesmen at the restaurant window.

‘Bake him. Then we’re moving you to another city.’

I think about it, I think about eating more than a candy bar, more than his hope. All the restaurants are anonymous now, those places I dine with people I do not know searching for myself among the ruins of the empire, me and my toothpaste tube captured in hotel rooms bearing the subtle fatigue of an excess of bodies.

‘Where this time?

‘Does it matter?’

It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter where I am because the life’s the same, except I’m losing myself.

‘How did I get here?’ I say.

‘You don’t want to know that, Harry.’

I watch him on the street down below as he walks to his car, a small man with small ideas, and I get ready.

It’s an easy hit. Fatso’s in the shower when I get inside his house, I can hear him singing Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Rain Coat. He’s croaking, ‘What can I tell you my brother, my killer,’ when he stops and gasps like a virgin as he sees me there in my black leather gloves. I say, ‘Bye baby,’ and spread his head over his nice white tiles. Problem is there’s a half-naked blonde in a G-string in the hallway, who screams and covers her large breasts as I run my eyes down her full figure. Pity to miss a fuck but I pop her too. She looks good enough to eat and I’m hungry as I head out of there. I stop on North Sheffield Avenue at the DMK Burger Bar.

The only beer they’ve got is Heineken and that’s when it hits me. I’m sitting at a bar in Detroit drinking Heineken when Frankie’s boys come in. They blackjack me in the john with my dick in my hand. One minute I’m pissing, next thing I’m lying in a white room listening to Mantovani. A pretty nurse comes in and checks my pulse. I’m aware of something solid in my head, a small hard thing at my temple. It’s a blur of pills and hotels after that.

It’s called the sponge filling. When a gun gets to know too much they control his brain, spooky but true. Soon he’s put in a cake and shipped out to the diners. This job’ll eat you alive.

Back at the apartment I open my temple with a scalpel. I cut just deep enough into the side of my head and peel back two inches of skin, removing the chip, which I put in my pocket. I stitch myself up, and put on my hat. I stare at it, the small stamp of state. Lodged there like ideology in the skin, they want it, they want it all, but I am aware of time.

Always watch time I say to you, before the generator falters to a stutter. Then I pack and head downstairs to the Lincoln waiting to take me to the next city.

The two bozos in the front yap about football as they take the detour. I shoot them at a junction and get a taxi to the airport, calling Frankie from my cell.

‘Think you could do away with me? I’m going freelance.’

‘Good job, we have a code. Await your next instructions,’ he says.

The line crackles like a snowstorm. I hear the code, it rises there empty as a shell.

Soon I see Bessie Coleman Drive and I taste freedom. It tastes of salt. I move like a shadow through the crowds. I ditch my Glock in a trash can.

As I’m booking my ticket I feel a hand on my shoulder and a cop asks me to come with him and his colleague. I’ll show them the pictures, I’ll tell them about the alliance. I’ll work for them. But Frankie is there and I am in Illinois. I am in LA among the long legs and the blondes and I realise I know what it is I am there to find, it is there trapped in the lens. You.

The cop smiles.

‘Do you like cup cakes?’ he says.

I bow out of town. I slide to the place they sent me to. I need to find the insect in the lens, they are recording it tall, we are all on film. I see it through the amber walls like a fly trapped in amber like us there waiting for their small summons. The hours spin backwards to the place I knew.

Now I remember being chased by the cop. I fly down the corridors back to Sunset Boulevard in the rain. I recall. Past tense now. History remembered. I am there in the film. Back there. The day I bought the Arachna Cam, the day Fly got his job as a cop. Fly my distant brother, as ephemeral as the tick of the second hand below the glass. Judgements linger on toilet walls, like slow graffiti in the rain. All I remember is, all of them, cop, moral man he was to tired to be. But above the glass there is only observation. My brother used to say we weren’t related, that I was something that had crawled out of our mother’s womb and infested the house. What kind of a fucking name is Florean? I called him Fly after the time I made him eat one. It was pregnant and he had little maggots crawling out of his mouth as I clamped my hand over his jaw. I used to kick my brother while he watched TV. Asshole. Cop. Maybe he was right.

I watched him walk to work in his uniform looking like an insect. I was sitting in the cafe over from the station dipping some bread in an egg, thinking the uncooked albumen looked like semen when I saw Tarita kissing this guy. She had her tongue down his mouth and her hand wandered down to his crotch. Right outside my window. And it came to me. Her husband, Hank, was my boss and a bigger asshole couldn’t be found with a GPS set to Shit City. I snapped the bitch with my cell. Watched her wander off to the office where I toiled in dull hatred for my colleagues day in day out. Watched her keep her ass as tight as a clenched fist as she waited for the automatic doors to open. I ordered another coffee.

When I got in late, Hank glared at me and I winked. I sat at my desk and looked at my emails as Hank and Tarita whispered about me over by the water cooler. I looked at her in her tight brown skirt, zipped up to her neat little waist, her pert breasts beneath the floral blouse she wore, buttoned right up to the top, and I wondered what lay beneath. She had this white face from which her bright red lips protruded obscenely, and when she opened her mouth you half expected her to stick a finger in it and run her nail along the edge of her soft wet gums. She had these long fingers like cigarette holders and the nails curved sharply at the ends. I once inspected them as she laid her hand on a desk, her back to me, as she talked to Hank. I thought I saw fragments of skin beneath them. And she moved in a way I had never seen another woman move. It was like her bones shifted the wrong way in her skeleton. And I never saw her eat. Not once.

They were a perfect pair. Hank had this way of rubbing his hands together when he was excited. His arms looked like feelers. And he had this fuzz around the top of his head. As I looked at them talking about me I contemplated another day in an office selling vending machine products. Another day when I looked at them all labouring behind their desks like insects.

Later Hank and Tarita came in.

‘Can you see us in an hour?’ he said.

I swung my shoes up on the desk, and put my hands behind my head.

‘Sure thing Hank, nice look you got going there, Tarita.’

I’d never used their first names before and they left my office looking like I’d stuck barbed wire in them. I knew they were going to sack me. And I wasn’t going to give Fly that pleasure. Fucking cop. He’d really enjoy that with his asshole definition of law and order. I once laid my hand on my brother’s shoulder when he wasn’t looking. I wanted to see if his eyes changed when he was alone. I suspected they did. My hand sounded like it was hitting a metal sheet.

A few minutes later I saw Tarita going into the stockroom. I followed her in and closed the door.

What do you think you’re doing?’ she said with this big lipsticked mouth open in a shock and outrage pose.

I peered inside. Her tongue had this tip on the end, a small protrusion of flesh like a clitoris.

‘I wanna show you a little snap I took.’ I flashed the picture in front of her. ‘Looks like your guy’s getting a hard on.’

She opened her red mouth and made this noise. Bzz bzz.

They didn’t sack me. Tarita gave this speech about how much they valued their workers and would I like to go on a training course, while Hank looked at her with incredulity. He kept rubbing his hands together and the hairs on his knuckles made small crackling noises, sparks rising from them into the cooled air of his office where a fish swam blindly in a tank.

Tarita gave me a lot of dough over the following weeks while I turned up late to work and moved out of the squalid damp apartment I shared with my brother.

‘You need fucking help,’ Fly said to me the day I left.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You’re sick in the head, you stopped taking your meds and you’re heading for trouble.’

‘And you’re heading for my boot.’

‘You can’t look after yourself, look at what happened the last time.’

‘What last time? What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘What do you think the burns are about?’ he said.

‘You’re the one who’s crazy.’

Fly lifted his shirt up. There was a bright red scorch mark that ran across his chest. I looked into his compound eyes and saw hard skeletal forms shift on some surface that looked like sand. There was an odour like burning rubber that rose from his skin.

He was saying something as I walked away, but all I could hear was a buzzing noise. I looked at him, his hard shell of a face, and watched his black tongue twitch in his tiny mouth like an electric worm.

I woke up the next morning with a naked hooker next to me. I stared at the room, the burnt spoon over by the toaster, her G string on the chair, her large tits, and saucer-like nipples, and wondered what day it was. She had a tattoo of a spider on her snatch and I looked at it nestled there against her labia. I got the blowtorch I used to burn the wallpaper off so I could see what was hiding underneath. I’d long suspected that the structures I inhabited were stage sets. I sometimes heard the whirring of unseen cameras beyond the hollow walls.

The hooker was breathing slowly as I ignited it. I had it an inch away from her tattoo when she woke and ran out of there.

After she left I tried out the Arachna cam. It said on the box, “We are the web.” I cruised some live sites and got bored. All the women did the same thing. I suspected they were all the same woman in different outfits. For a long time I’d suspected the sites were owned by a monopolist who was engineering sexuality. A pornographer was trying to manufacture one sexual response.

I wanted something new. Tarita’s money was running out and I wondered how long I could keep the nail in her.

Later that day I called her.

‘This is the last payment,’ she said.

‘I want you to do something.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I want you to strip and put on a show for me, link it up to my cam.’

‘No.’

‘I’ll take it straight to Hank. I got other pictures.’

‘Why do you hate me so much?’

‘Because you’re inhuman.’

There was a gasp on the other end of the line and then it went dead. As she hung up I heard a scuttling noise, like small hard feet tapping the hollow top of a wooden box.

I called again an hour later and she agreed.

‘On one condition, this is the last you ask,’ she said.

‘Deal.’

I was sipping Tequila and crushing the ice between my teeth when she began the show. She popped up on my screen in a negligee, looked at me, and moved towards the bed. I stared at the cam as she did the things they all do, to begin with. She turned her back and let the negligee drop to the floor, let it slide down her toned legs. She took off her bra and turned to the cam, hands over her tits. She looked into the cam, dropped her hands, ran them up her body and rubbed her nipples. Then she turned round and slid out of her panties. She bent over so I got an eyeful of her ass. Then she gave me the full frontal. She looked good, her tits were firm and she had a good figure. Her cunt had a tuft of thick black hair sprouting from it and she put her hand down there and lay down.

She spread her legs and began rubbing herself, her neck arched, her fingers covering most of the action. Then she removed her hand and I saw it.

It looked like a wound on the side of a bleeding cow, like someone had hacked her open. And there was something alive inside it. I saw black legs wriggling around in there and then it came out of her, all eight legs dripping with come, dragging an umbilical cord. She reached out her hand.

‘Come to bed with me,’ she said, her eyes black and hollow, as if someone had scooped them out of her head.

It crawled across her legs towards the camera and shot venom at the screen.

I went to the bathroom and sprayed carrots and booze down the toilet.

She came into my office the next day and put her hand on my leg.

‘Did you like what you saw?’ she said.

They were in her eyes. A whole fucking nest of them.

‘What the fuck are you?’

I looked at her. She didn’t have a head but a tagmata. In the fluorescent light of the office the anthropod segments were clear.

She locked the door, pulled down the blind and began to strip. And I watched, stuck to my chair as she peeled away her clothes and stood there in front of me.

‘Now you know, you can have me,’ she said.

The words came out of her mouth in small clicking sounds.

She had her hand down my pants and pulled it out and sat on it. She squeezed my cock inside her and clenched it hard with a muscle that felt like a hand. She rode me on the office chair. As she climaxed she put her finger in her mouth and rubbed the tip of her tongue. The clitoral protrusion was bright red and squirted me with some clear fluid that shot out of her mouth and smelt like acid. She left me dripping as she stood and dressed with a calculated knowledge of corruption deep within her alabaster face and the lying lines etched across it. I looked at her, come dripping down her thigh and I saw it, its legs working out of her snatch like feelers coming out of the wall. She opened her snatch up right in front of me, parted her lips like two cuts of raw steak, marbled and lined with fat, and I saw it. I saw its eyes, bright red with a million computers inside them. Beneath the surface of her flesh things were moving. Their motion was an entomological conspiracy I knew was pandemic among the forces controlling our streets.

‘I suppose you’ll plug your orifice, tear off some genitals, eat some body parts or engage in a psychedelic ritual,’ I said.

‘That belongs in the comic books,’ she said, a slow sure smile working its way across her face like a measured scar.

They live beneath memory. Could I find them in the fermions of hidden sexual mutation? Did they exist in the half-integral spin of subatomic matter? She turned herself inside out, like a breathing glove of insect flesh, watching me watch her show. She ran her nail along the edge of her snail-like skin, letting the slime seep out of her as she yowled and threw her neck back, her bullet nipples erect and dripping black milk from her swollen breasts across which black cicatrices emerged like the slow crack in a window pane. I wouldn’t let her crack my window. I saw it there within her, her body a plot against mankind, her juices full of acid corruption.

She dressed and closed the door.

I quit. I sat at my apartment drinking whisky.

I surfed the net for an answer. I studied the nature of bombs. And as I did I saw small red eyes peering at me out of the cam. I ripped it out. I threw it at a passing bum from a speeding taxi that dropped me off near the shop.

I’d made the bomb from Semtex, spent hours studying how to make sure it detonated. The shop sold nothing but fucking insects. A freak show place for insect whores. It had a chain across the city and I was heading to each of them with a bomb. I was Herod waging war against arachnids in a violent twilight set against the spider snatch of Tarita and her insect seductions in the scuttling dark. She was probably preparing others like her. They were running the live shows and feasting on humanity. They were filling vending machines across the country with food that would render people pliable to them. The police force bought their products.

I peered through the window. Spiders were crawling across the silent glass of their cages. One assumed the form of a naked model, wearing only a skirt. It raised the hem with hairy fingers and showed me a thick bush covering a wound.

I set the device down and walked far enough away. Then I flicked the switch. I watched the shop explode into an orange ball as I headed across town on a stolen Yamaha, my list in my hand.

I blew up all the shops before the police cars flooded the corner of the last road in flames. The cops stepped out of their cars and marched toward me like ants.

‘Did you see anything?’ one of them said.

‘I’ve seen everything, I have a window on the world.’

He looked at me and took off his gloves. He was writing something in his note book and I watched the thick hair crawl all over his hands.

‘Someone is blowing up shops selling insects, can you tell me anything at all?’ he said.

‘The next guy you arrest will beat you to death with a tyre iron, he will rape your wife and torch you. You are my brother, I always loved you, and you ask me that?’ I said.

I watched them scuttle around the crime scene as I left.

The next day I bought a can of fly spray and a lighter. I tailed Tarita to the office. As she stopped I gained on her and flicked that Zippo like a switchblade. The spray ejaculated out of the can and I touched it with the flame, and as she turned I hit her with a stream of fire. She was clutching at me and she went down screaming. Her touch felt like a hot needle.

She looked like a burnt raisin on the ground. I could hear the noise of hard wings beating against each other as I headed out of there.

I went back to the flat and shaved my hands. Then I dug into the walls looking for them beneath the apparent surface of buildings, hunting them into the arthropodal dark. There are no cities they can send me to. There are only the walls with their permeable membranes and time my soldier.

I stand there waiting for their orders. Present tense. The now. The no zone of temporal shift. Gears clunk and navigate their way through the fog of propaganda. But I stand here in the hotel room back in Chicago where it all began, two beats of a bird’s heartbeat ago, ephemeral time, their code. Here in Chicago I hunt America. Another city, another town. But they are all the same beneath the tarnished mirror lie more lies, crawling against the glass.

WHITE GULL

Richard Godwin

I have written this journal for posterity and with the strict intention of disclosing to future historians the identity of the man who became known as Jack the Ripper. The common press, both fallible and corrupt, painted a picture that I will not let remain the final word on him. And while what I am writing here is both a confessional and a narrative account of sorts, it is ultimately a challenge to those who believe they can determine events whose nature lies outside their sphere of experience.

I am meticulous, even in my manner of dress. I am poisoned from inside, and bleed disease and plague, since you needed me there among your sexual ruins.

August 1^st 1873.

I used the terms ‘a peculiar form of disease occurring mostly in young women’ in my address to the British Medical Association at Oxford. I discovered the anorexia nervosa and it discovered me. For this is about the body and control of the body and I offer you now a precise archaeology of me and my mind. Read on and observe how a man may be split. I inhabit two realms and even now may invade your mind like a virus, replicating myself within your thoughts. We all lead double lives. The difference between me and you is that you dwell within your thoughts alone, inert, a static recipient of other things. And it is those other things I turn to now as I will tell you the story of how the events in White Chapel, that place of whores and excrement, came about, and why.

Standing before the Medical Association I was aware of a sense of arousal in myself as I recounted my observations. The day I made the discovery it was heightened. I was examining a young woman my the name of Daphne Bleacher, an emaciated and attractive twenty-two year old, who would have been a beauty had she not starved herself of nourishment. She had pale blue eyes and a delicate disposition and a fine clear skin that would appeal to most men.

Yet she was ill, gravely ill, and her appeal was lost by her need to deny her body. It is all about the control of the body, medicine, and murder. As I examined her, and I looked at her wan breasts, like two wrinkles upon her chest, I felt the overwhelming urge to penetrate her with my scalpel. This young woman needed to be shown where such habits may lead.

I asked her to remove her underthings and watched as she slipped out of them and got back on the examining couch. She had a mons veneris that reminded me of a peach. And I decided to show her what would happen to her if she carried on. As a scientist I trace the aetiology, I study the causes of disease, and I am doing so here in this scientific confessional. I am showing you where my own particular disease was born, there, watching a naked woman on my couch look up at me with an innocence that made me want to kill her.

I touched her, lightly at first, then more firmly, searching her eyes for arousal, but all I saw was fear. She knew what I was doing was wrong but she dared not speak to me.

‘Daphne do you know where your habit of not eating will lead to?’ I said.

‘I imagine to illness.’

‘It will lead to the loss of pleasure. That is why I am doing this, I have no feelings for you, understand, I am engaging you with bodily pleasure.’

‘But should you be touching me in such an intimate manner doctor?’

‘I am performing a thorough examination of your body. Are you a virgin?’

‘No.’

She was becoming aroused now and I wanted to do it there in my office. I glanced at the scalpel next to me, the light overhead caught its surface and it was blinding, urging me to do it. For while I lied to her as I explored her body, I wanted to desecrate her skin with medical implements. I wanted to violate her.

‘You need to enjoy food when you eat it,’ I said.

‘I am worried I will get fat.’

‘The picture you carry in your head of how you look is distorted. You can’t judge things accurately, you are not judging what is happening now with any degree of accuracy.’

‘What do you recommend I do, doctor?’ she said, looking up at me with those pale blue eyes.

‘Tell me how what I am doing feels to you.’

‘I do not dare.’

I picked up the scalpel. I was a hair’s breadth from doing it there, entering her with the metal when my reason stopped me. Not here, not in my office it counselled me. It is worse than my irrational urges, it corrupts and guards me at the same time, like a sick and poisonous lawyer always at my side telling me how to get away with things.

I put the scalpel down. I removed my hand and watched her flush with embarrassment. I handed Daphne her clothes. As she dressed it came to me where I would take the need I had discovered in myself that rainy afternoon. I would corrupt the bodies of the unwanted, of women who had no importance whatsoever.

‘I advise you to eat and have sex Daphne,’ I said.

‘I will try but my body seems to reject food.’

Then she was gone, taking her embarrassment with her. I thought about what had just occurred. I had been on the brink of killing the young woman. The thought gave me intense satisfaction and also frustration since I had not done it. And I wondered why this had occurred.

It was that night I realised it, as I lay and listed to the wind howl. Until that day I had successfully repressed my urge to take control of my patients’ bodies. I diagnose, I heal. I also want to violate and own them to the point of death. For you see death is better than intercourse and stronger. I am a deity of sorts, fighting it, but it made its demand on me that afternoon feeling her skeleton beneath her uncorrupted skin.

As a surgeon I have to force the body to its remedy, I have to ensure that disease is eliminated. I realised that there were many diseases on the streets of London, sicknesses of a moral kind that needed to be excised. If I were to do it I would simply be extending my services as a surgeon to another field. That was all, I told myself as I rolled over and dreamed of blood.

It was as I sprinkled arsenic on my breakfast of kidneys the next morning that it occurred to me that much of my career was a preparation for what was about to occur. My support for women in medicine, my record of excellence, were a perfect cover. It was as if I had built a façade to hide my true intent. I looked at myself in the mirror in the hall before leaving and it seemed to me there was another man living silently beneath my watchful eyes.

August 2^nd 1873

He needed voice and I was about to give it to him, or perhaps he spoke through me, and I existed as a channel for something not yet defined. A dark birth was occurring within the womb of my mind, I felt it scratching at my brain with claws as I walked to my office thinking of all the bodies I had cut in my career.

The sound of tearing flesh troubled me all day, it assumed a maddening pitch in my head as I conversed with colleagues about our latest discoveries in the field of medicine. And all the while it occurred to me I needed to cut away the sexual corruption on the streets of London. As a doctor I am commissioned to remove disease. There are other things I did during those interim years of listening to him prattle to me of the things I needed to do. I fought for my respectability and moral ground, I drank at times, at others did things, private things wherein I contemplated acts of violence to my own body.

August 30^th 1888.

I fought it for fifteen years, that dark knowledge that dwelt inside me like a tumour. I struggled for my sense of self, reminding myself in repeated lectures before the tarnished mirror of my bathroom that I was a surgeon, a man destined to save lives. But in the end his conviction won me over and I realised it was my own voice I was hearing in my head.

Its logic was overwhelming. My every effort to bring reason to bear on it ended with my conclusion that it was I who was illogical, that what I was hearing was the necessary course of action. And so I took it one dark night when the London sky was bloodshot. I went out with my knife to find their flesh.

August 31^st 1888.

What I was committing was moral surgery. To cut away the things that corrupt the body politic and preserve it from the whores.

They speak of the canonical five, but there were more, many more, an unnumbered amount of women I released from their disease. Except these fell within a different jurisdiction, that of my medical practice, for I did eventually succumb to cutting my patients and disguised it as surgery. But I am writing now of what occurred in Whitechapel.

I trod the pavements like a spectre, hiding in the shadows seeking my first patient out. It was long after midnight when I came across Mary Ann Nichols. She was drunk when I saw her stumbling across the road near Buck’s Row. She looked at me and raised the hem of her filthy skirt, offering her soiled flesh to me and I advanced upon her like a wraith. I was about to raise her skirt higher than she did. I was about to raise her blood to the surface of her sick skin.

I hauled her to the gated stable entrance and clamped my hand around her throat until she choked. Then I slashed her neck. It was a simple and classic cut, left to right, and severed her artery, releasing a shower of blood that left me with a sense of sexual arousal for hours. My knife was eight inches long and I cut open her stomach there beneath a sullen sky in the early morning air that smelt of acid and poison.

She fell to the ground and I raised her skirt, her genitals were monstrous, you see, a mutilation of the feminine. They had no place there among humankind. All flesh is different. There is the flesh of the decayed, those I operated on in a lawless place, and the flesh of the pure, my good patients to whom I tended and whom I remedied.

I returned to my house and slept. All night long I was troubled by the image of her disordered sex. I rose the next day and thought of my act the night before. It was clear to me I had done the necessary thing. These women had to be removed to cleanse London. I had to redeem the city from their pollution.

I speak of a lawless place. It was evident to me that first morning that I was beyond apprehension, that despite how they tried, the police would never catch me, or even know my true identity. I knew I was acting beyond history, and that only I could disclose the identity of the man they called Jack the Ripper.

I will stuff this journal below the floorboards of my house when I am finished with it and see what alert historian stumbles onto its pages. Or I will stuff its pages into the mouth of a whore. I will make her eat the truth of what I am. I dwell within the bones of London, your piece of necessary folklore.

September 1^st 1888

The next morning I received an unexpected visit from an old patient. I barely recognised Daphne Bleacher as she strode into my office, a buxom and attractive woman. I will recount what she said to me. It has great significance in the history of his case and the reasons I killed the whores.

‘Doctor you have cured me,’ she said.

‘I remember you on my couch and what I advised.’

‘I took your advice. I have had many partners now and am able to eat well.’

‘So you used sex to regain the sense of pleasure.’

‘Yes, I have led a life that may have caused me to fall under moral opprobrium.’

‘Yet you no longer starve yourself.’

‘That is right doctor.’

‘I remember touching you on my couch.’

‘I was aroused and it helped me, do you think I am a whore?’

‘No, I do not think you are a whore.’

And so she left my office and left me to my conviction of what I needed to do. These were the days of my surgery.

September 7^th 1888.

I had my imitators, that I know, small men with little minds tired of their wives or daughters. We inhabit a society as sick as a patient in need of amputation. Would the women I killed be missed? The answer is evident upon close analysis and everything I did was the result of close analysis.

September 8^th 1888.

I found her by the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, my second whore. I was wearing my deer-stalker hat and my knife was hidden by the long overcoat I had on. She was looking for trade, evidently in need of money and I relished the desperation in her tired eyes. You see she was already dead, living a life like that, I was simply confirming the case, knife in hand, an experienced surgeon on the scene. I took her into the back yard on the pretence of sexual intercourse, instead I slashed her throat.

She didn’t see it coming. I whipped the knife from my coat and hacked in deeply. Her flesh gave way like melting wax as she spurted blood, and I realised then in that moment on that black night just what it was I saw of Eros there in the frenetic comedy of the final moments of these soiled prostitutes. These women were ejaculating, it was their menses I had summoned from their throats. I cut open her stomach.

I need anatomical proof of what I was seeing. She had no ovaries, she was missing the vital parts that constitute a woman, I was killing a pollutant on our streets. I took away her uterus for closer examination leaving her with her lolling tongue pointing uselessly at the indifferent sky, like a clitoris in her face.

At my office I examined it. It was not flesh, I tell you, it was made of something else, but not the flesh of woman. I had my second career, that of excisor of the disease. I knew I needed to work fast and accurately to ensure the cessation of the spread of the disease. And so I worked the nightshift.

September 29^th 1888.

I recalled the many times when cutting a patient I would have the urge to slash them and mutilate them. I had successfully repressed this urge for many years and now it seemed to me it had found its natural outlet in the removal of these women. I have theorised that my role as surgeon had removed something in me, I questioned the role I had adopted at night, but logic and morality dictated to me then and I knew what while what I did may seem to some beyond the pale I was saving you all from something far worse. You needed me, you see, the man they wrongly called Jack the Ripper. You ought to have called me the White Gull, for I am not black but I inhabit a realm of moral purity beyond your cognizance. And I am no dupe, my earnest reader.

For I take it that it is your moral seriousness that has brought you to read thus far into my narrative of scientific events. Of course that and nothing else would do so.

To understand the nature of what I did you have to comprehend the moral corruption I was fighting. It was a surgery of the streets. I had taken my operating theatre to the pavements of London to offer the city a remedy. You had all fallen below a sexual mark that threatened civilisation.

With my knife I removed it and gave the police a job to do, as I watched them arrest all the wrong people. They didn’t understand what was occurring in their territory.

September 30^th 1888.

I sharpened my knife obsessively. Each day I would rise and take it to a small room at the back of my house where I would ensure it had the edge of a razor. It was a satisfying job, preparing for my nightshift. My wife didn’t suspect a thing. I was a man whose reputation acted as a shield against all forms of suspicion. I covered my tracks well.

I ensured the cutting I performed was rough enough to remove any idea that the man committing the acts was a medical professional. I knew where to strike and how, to both ensure I was effective and remained at large. For while they hunted me I was at liberty to continue with the deeds of which I now write. I went in search of the next one. I travelled the dark streets with my knife and medical knowledge.

I sought her out, it was my knife that needed her flesh, needed its excisions to hiss from her skin in the night air. And I found her.

Elizabeth Stride in a black jacket and skirt, a posy of a red rose in a spray of maidenhair fern. I hated her in her black crepe bonnet, this posture of decency cloaking sin. For it was sin I was there to remove. I needed to redeem the feminine against the tide of filth and lust. She looked at me with the knowing eyes of one who profits from desire but she did not know what I was or what I was about to do to her.

I had plans for her, dismemberment beyond the kind I had practised on the others. She began to talk to me and I slashed her throat, quickly. She pressed her fingers to the spray of blood as I was about to cut her stomach. I wanted to relieve her of her innards and hang them on the wall, but I was disturbed that night by a pony and cart. It rattled into the yard in Berner Street. The driver did not see me, and I fled the scene unable to perform the rest of the surgery.

I couldn’t leave it there unfinished, it would have been impossible to return home and so I sought another one that night. Catherine Eddowes was in Mitre Square when I saw her. She began talking, offering her services and I hacked at her neck and mouth. I wanted to remove her mouth, since a woman of her kind should not be allowed to speak to men of moral substance.

And I mutilated her. It was the necessary act. I removed her clothes and cut her open and then I placed her intestines over her right shoulder. I placed a piece between her body and left arm. I cut the lobe and auricle of the right ear. Then I placed a bruise the size of a sixpence on the back of her left hand with my gloved thumb between her thumb and first finger. I almost laughed at the game I was playing with the police, tricking them, giving them the sense of design when the only design was the removal of these whores.

I left her there, soiled, ruined, alone and with her face to the empty sky. I returned to my house and to my bed.

You see I made it look like the work of a butcher, no surgeon would have made the cuts I did. And therein lay the genius of what I did, I disguised it all utterly from their minds. The police of course erroneously concluded the murders were the act of a man with no scientific knowledge. I was pleased with their conclusion, the mindless fools.

But as I lay down to sleep I thought of all the other things I wanted to do to their bodies. And the aborted operation irked me.

The frustration was appalling, I writhed on my bed and stirred my wife. She touched me in the dark, demanding sex with idle hands that clutched at my night clothes. And as I entered her and looked at her face below me, her mouth open as she gasped, I saw the faces of the whores and had to turn away and shudder with my back to her after I had spent myself and my desire inside her body. The room smelled of decay and I dreamed all night of chasing spectres along deserted London streets. I awoke to the sound of laughter.

September 31^st 1888.

It was over breakfast after I washed the night way that it occurred to me. I was eating my second serving of kidneys and sprinkled some arsenic liberally on it and I looked at my wife. She was a moral woman, a good wife, and am embodiment of all the female virtues. But I could see how any woman would become corrupted if the whores continued to exist. They occupied the hem of their minds like a moral contagion. Once I had killed them there would be no need to be concerned about any woman in London. But I need to operate deeper on their bodies. I needed to remove the disease. You see, I was protecting women.

I sank my teeth into the kidneys and felt the meat nourish my mind. I prepared the next operation in my study, knowing now what it was I needed to remove.

As my wife cleared the table I watched her. I studied her movements and drew distinctions between the way a moral woman moved and the way a whore did.

My wife must have seen me watching her for she stopped and turned, looked at me, and set down the plate she was holding. She inspected her dress.

‘I thought I must have spilled something,’ she said.

‘Not at all my dear.’

‘Then why are you spying on me? Is there something amiss?’

‘Spying on you, no, is it wrong for a husband to look at his wife?’

‘Well it depend how he looks.’

‘Was there something wrong in the manner in which I was looking at you?’

‘It didn’t look like you.’

‘Now what does that mean?’

‘For a moment I thought another man was in the room.’

‘Another man?’

‘You are always so preoccupied, it is rare for you to pay me such attention.’

‘Preoccupied?’

‘With work.’

‘I see.’

‘It was the manner in which you were looking at me that disturbed me.’

‘And what manner was that?’

‘I’ve been looked at like that before by men in the street.’

‘Men in the street?’

‘Common men with foul thoughts.’

‘My dear I have no such thoughts.’

‘I know, your head is full of science and such matters.’

‘I was simply thinking what a virtuous woman you are.’

‘I see, if that is all then I shall finish clearing the table.’

‘That’s all it is.’

I watched as Susan left the room. I listened to her clatter crockery in the parlour. Then I went to my office and studied my range of scalpels, all the blades sharp and clean, and thought of all the operations I had performed with them. By noon my desire to commit another operation outside the surgery was ravenous inside me.

November 9^th 1888.

I do not know what it was about their throats that drew me so to the initial severing of their flesh there. Perhaps it was their voices, their common hoarse whispers offering sex, emanating from sexual sewage that was so offensive to my ear that I wanted to hack it from them. Perhaps it was the fact that the flesh of it was bare and I did not want to see the rest of them unless it was the butchered parts I left for the police to pore over in their endless fascination with irrelevant details. Nevertheless it was the image of their throats naked and alive that drew me back there that night when I performed the final surgery.

I’d tried fighting it. The conversation with Susan had unnerved me. I sensed perhaps she detected a change in me. I threw myself into work and the evaluation of the body of moral woman against the body of the whores. I made detailed notes and kept these locked beneath the sesame floorboards where I will soon deposit this journal. But each time I examined a female patient and looked at their naked forms I was tempted to cut them with my scalpel. I wanted to penetrate them in numerous ways and they seemed to be coaxing me to do it, looking up at me with smiles and coy eyes that told me all I needed to know about their sexual desires and how close the general population was to catching the contagion that was spreading like a pandemic.

I knew what I needed to do to stop it. And so that night I left my house and travelled to Dorset Street in Spitalfields. I’d seen Mary Jane Kelly before, noted her whereabouts and habits and made my way there to the place where she offered her body to customers. She let me into her room and began undressing. I pulled my knife and cut her throat so fast she did not register what had occurred until she saw the blood. Then I performed the surgery on her flesh.

It was the only way to stop the disease. I had to find the core of it there in the flesh of the whore.

I placed her on the bed and removed the surface of her abdomen and thighs. I emptied her abdominal cavity of its viscera. I cut off her breasts, mutilated her arms with jagged wounds and hacked her face beyond recognition. I severed the tissues of her neck to the bone. I found the disease lurking there amid her body. I removed it and she ate it. I will not describe it to you, I do not wish to offend your sensibilities. As a man of medicine it was a simple routine operation.

I placed her uterus and kidney and one breast under her head to make it known the disease was over. I placed her other breast by her right foot and her liver between her feet. I put her intestines to the right side and her spleen to the left of her body. I put the flaps from her abdomen and thighs on a table.

I left her then and returned home where I slept until dawn. I awoke well rested and ate a hearty breakfast and enjoyed my arsenic. It was as I was pouring it on my food that I momentarily wondered if perhaps it was not a good ingredient for my meals. But I have always enjoyed the taste of arsenic and plan to continue using it. Why not add a little flavour to our meals?

I went to my office where I examined several female patients who were all pure. I had lunch with colleagues and concluded I had cured London of a severe sexual disease.

And so I ended my nocturnal forays into the world of whores and their soiled flesh. I continued to work as a surgeon and made numerous discoveries.

My operations on the street gave me great insights into the workings of disease generally. The police continued to hunt for the man who had saved London, looking in all the wrong places. It became a daily comedy to me reading their latest attempts in the newspaper, and I had to hide my laughter from my wife. Sometimes she’d look at me across the table with a question in her eyes. But she’d never suspect me, not for a moment.

November 10^th 1888.

An eminent surgeon is beyond suspicion. I am Sir William Gull, and I have treated the Queen of England. She is morally pure, as you would expect. I have seen many bodies and know instantly what kind they are and how to treat them. And that is why I knew what I had to do on those night trips into London. If the disease returns I may have to perform more surgery on the streets.

If you have found this journal then you have become the historian of a pathology. I am going to the operating theatre.

THE LIARS OF THE LAUGHING CITY

Richard Godwin

I waited for the sound to die down.

The screaming had gone on all night, my first night in the Laughing City.

I was there on a job, the remit to assassinate Artemus Lime.

No one had heard of him, and he had not been sighted since his murder of the president.

Their lies dripped from their tongues like semen from a hooker.

Not that I cared, another lying politician out of the way.

The case had been chewed over and effectively buried by the press, since it had coincided with the leak about the missing millions.

Yes, the president had siphoned off a sizeable chunk of the economy. So sizeable that the hungry mobs on the streets committed more murders in yet more savage fashion.

Women were raped and mutilated, their body parts sold off to fast food chains that had no other supplies for the hamburgers the soup kitchens fed the workers on. The lies here were worse than those back home. The whole place stank of dead flesh and cover up.

The city was a mess. Anyone out after dark risked dismemberment. And thanks to the president, there was no police force. Only the extremely wealthy were protected by private security firms who shot on sight.

As the cold grey dawn rose like a leper, I looked out at the horizon of the Laughing City and wondered how it had got its name. I hadn’t heard laughter in years. Back home it was bomb blasts and bullshit.

I poured a protein drink and ran through the quickest way of finding and killing him.

I’d start at the downtown bars. Lime had a reputation for liking prostitutes and there were some really tasty ones, I heard. The mutations which resulted from the last dirty bomb were endless and threw up some surprising sexual combinations, for those with a taste for that kind of thing.

Artemus Lime, bounty hunter and killer, space nomad and politicians’ whore. If the money was right he’d do it.

I’d heard he was a multi-hole man.

I guess it beat golf.

I hired a shuttle downtown and watched as the light changed to that opaque, colourless fog that characterised the poorer parts.

The stench of rotting flesh was overpowering. They still hadn’t cleaned up many of the body parts after the last explosion.

Silver crows and lizard dogs scavenged in the trash for human parts, chasing each other for bits of spleen and ruptured kidney.

The crows usually won, tearing strips from the dogs’ balls.

I found the place I was looking for, my only lead.

‘Horny Holes Fuck House’ loomed out at me beyond the spare rib kitchen. The carcasses hanging outside certainly didn’t look animal.

Felix Baw had been typically unforthcoming with me. I’d worked for him before and he came across as if he despised everyone he employed, giving them only the barest of facts about a case and expecting them to get on with it. Baw, child of the Laughing City.

I got out of the shuttle and a pimp in a white suit walked up to me.

“Hole or hat? We got em all, juicy hole, multi-hole, can do a hat job if you like, drugs, have you tried free spurt? Come in, we got some inside, want to see my ladies?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Yeah, I got. Free spurt?”

“I don’t need it.”

“You try, you like. Guaranteed.”

I wasn’t about to blow my brains on a plutonium-enriched smoke that would give me cosmic come and turn me into one of the gibbering wrecks I now saw walking toward me.

“How about hat job?”

“I thought it was illegal, even out here.”

“We don’t blow all brain into hat for fuck, just some of it, use smaller hat so some brain go on floor, and dancer can do dirty stuff to em.”

I felt like hitting him.

“Might as well sell a bag of warm vomit.”

“I do good deal.”

“I’m going in there,” I said and pointed to the fuck house.

The pimp switched on his really upset look, but I wasn’t buying.

“No. I got better ones, come see.”

I walked on, dodging the beggar.

Inside, it was dark and stank of mustard for some reason.

Someone or something grabbed my arm.

“Try me.”

Adjusting to the light, I made out a hybrid lady with several eyes and tits the size of rocket launchers.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said.

“You find her,” she said, wiggling her arse at me.

I showed her the picture.

“Ooh, he real ugly. I no fuck with him,” she said. “Come on, I give you good one.”

She was trying to drag me upstairs when a man dressed only in shorts and with a belly the size of a large animal kicked her so hard she jumped several feet in the air and crashed against the bar.

The blind barman dropped a glass and the only customer sitting there tried to help her up, grabbing hold of one of her tits by mistake.

“Get off me, you fuck. You pay touch.”

“Can I help?” fatso said.

“I’m looking for this man,” I said, and showed him the picture.

He rubbed his chin.

“Mmm, look familiar. Yes, I have seen this man before. Now, where was it?”

I put a hundred then another one in his palm.

“Much more for address,” he said.

I kept throwing them at him, all expenses of course, and eventually he wrote it down on a slip of paper.

“O Screech Avenue.”

“This it?”

“Sure, why not?” he said. “You go. See if I give you bad dose, come back fuck my ladies.”

“Just one question.”

“Yes?”

“What’s that smell?”

He sniffed the air and then held his arms up.

“What smell?”

“Smells like mustard.”

He snorted.

“Not mustard. P2.”

I was out of there and in the shuttle.

P2 had been developed by Panacea Drugs, which had a monopoly on all medical supplies. It was a chemical specifically designed to wipe out the smell of rotting flesh.

Happy Holes Fuck House should have had ‘Necrophiliacs Welcome’ in neon lights underneath it.

As it was, Screech Avenue turned out to be a good lead. Fatso had been worth the talk.

Number 0 was harder to find, located just at the intersection of a shop selling weapons parts and a derelict house.

From the street, you couldn’t see it, camouflaged as all zeros were, hence their popularity. But when you looked from the air, there it was, all gleaming pole and glass metal.

I took the flier up and saw it the first time. That’s always the way with zeros, if you don’t see them straight off, they use their programmed disguises to throw you off the scent.

Popular with all killers and politicians, they had been snatched up when first built and were prime real estate.

I wasn’t going to waste any more time than I had to.

I assembled an A1 bomb back at my hotel and returned at nightfall, just as the tribes were crawling out of the sewers.

The smell of shit and menses was overpowering and after checking to see if any lights were visible from the flier and deciding that even if Lime was in, he wouldn’t be that obvious, I just blew the door off.

Shards of glass and burning metal swept across the street like a tornado, catching in the flesh of the tribes who had now surfaced.

Heads and limbs flew through the air as their mouths, stuffed with scraps of human meat, dropped their goodies on the floor and salivated long thick shreds of drool onto their wasted hands.

They shrieked like slaughtered animals and ran back into their shelters.

I put out the blaze and entered his place.

Typical assassin’s pad: metal furniture and nothing on display. I mean nothing. Like a display hotel room. No pictures on the wall, no personal effects, save one: a monitor on the wall giving readouts of activity across the city. I flicked the screen: it was focused on the spaceport.

He knew I was here.

Back at my hotel I considered my options and knew that the lead was squandered.

I decided to check out in the morning and go underground.

This was going to take longer than expected, and I would need more expenses.

I tried Baw, but it was a no go.

Black-out had fallen down below: another terrorist strike.

Except that night, Lime came looking for me.

He obviously wanted this out of the way.

I knew he was a busy man and his services much in demand.

I was in the bathroom when I heard the door open.

Through the crack in the sealant I saw his shape move against the wall. He was making his way into the bedroom.

I engaged my weapon and crept out after him.

Just as I lined his head up, he turned and the blast caught his ear, shooting it off and making him jump. He leapt through the window and landed down below without difficulty. From the window, I saw him disappear.

He had dropped something, a scrap of paper.

It made interesting reading.

It was a job sheet, ordering my assassination, signed by Felix Baw. Agent: Artemus Lime.

I knew what I had to do.

Staying underground was easy. Second nature.

Finding Lime was harder.

And all the time the laughter got louder, more insistent.

At times as I paced the city I wondered whether it was more a cackle than a laugh. At other times it sounded like a guffaw, then it would trill into a melodious giggle, like a little girl’s. Sometimes in the middle of the night you would hear a booming laugh, then in the morning a gentle titter. The noise started to drive me crazy and I was no nearer to finding Lime.

Baw was inaccessible. No surprise there.

I kept trying him so that he wouldn’t suspect I knew.

The lies mounted up like spare flesh.

Then, one day, one of my leads paid off.

The owner of a weapons shop Lime used called me.

I gave him the money and he showed me straight to him: in an apartment at the back of some government buildings.

Artemus Lime was a government man.

It all made sense.

The ease with which the President’s assassination had been forgotten, Baw’s sudden interest in hiring me. He’d made a lot since the assassination, and there was something I obviously knew which bothered him. What?

Meantime, I took care of Lime.

My source said he often took delivery at nights and after a few hours waiting, I watched as an armoured van arrived and two guys went in. After they left, I silently walked down the government corridors and stopped outside his flat. This time I would use a blaster.

I had no questions to ask.

The A1 blew the door off, and I saw Lime jump up at the back of the flat and race toward his weapon.

I shot him from the blazing doorway, a good first shot that took his head off, spraying brain matter and tissue right across the hallway. It was a pointillist effect and quite becoming to the apartment, which needed a little cheering up, all metal surfaces and nothing homey about it.

As I walked over to him, Lime lay twitching like an insect in a pool of blood. One arm reached uselessly across the wet floor. I think he was looking for his head, which lay in bits several feet away. You only get one shot at me, and he failed.

His neck was still showering the flat and it was a little messy, so I just burned him up and looked around the place for any evidence which might be useful, but found nothing.

“Bye Lime,” I said, “can’t shut your door, but I guess they’ll find you in the morning. Hope the tribes enjoy what’s left of you, I don’t know if they like it barbecued.”

I spent one more night in the Laughing City, convinced that the noise was getting louder.

That is, apparently, one of its effects, the volume.

It’s personal, you see, a strangely hallucinogenic experience.

Some people hear a titter, some a whine, but it’s different every time. It doesn’t always start with laughter, as with me. After the screaming, the laughter came at first as a welcome relief. But then it got louder and louder until by the last night it just sounded like an audience roaring at a joke I’d missed.

I went out for dinner and every road echoed with it. At times obscene, at times gentle, it followed me like a beggar.

The waiter must have noticed my disquiet. As I paid, he said: “Everything all right, sir?”

“That obvious?” I said.

“Food no good?”

“Food was fine. It’s the laughter that’s getting me down.”

“Oh, you get used to it. Tribes are out tonight.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How do you get used to it? Why the Laughing City?”

“You don’t know? Oh, well, after the war, you know the old one, when the first wave of mutants were created, the noise at night was terrible. Screaming, choking, all night, drove you mad. When people first heard them scream, they didn’t know how they could make so much noise. You take a good look at the tribes tonight when you leave here. Most tourists don’t see them, but have a good long look at them. The noise was terrible, the screaming as they found survivors and dismembered them, tore them apart, flesh scattering everywhere, disgusting, never have that in my restaurant. So they keyed it in.”

“The laughter?”

He nodded.

“They run it on a loop. Sometimes, when the tribes are quiet it go down. And sometimes, it get louder and louder when they really tear bodies apart. Then the noise is much worse, you prefer the laughing if you stay here, believe me.”

“It’s a disc,” I said.

“We need tourist. Tourist like it.”

On my way back to my hotel, I saw a tribe descend onto the street like a pack of animals. Their teeth were red with the proceeds of their night’s feasting, blood dripping from their fangs and splattering the road. They’d obviously been on a feeding frenzy, and must have found fresh supplies, even though I hadn’t heard any blasts, but then the laughter would have covered it up. Chunks of flesh were scattered around the street like debris, and as I got into the shuttle, I had a good look. I’d seen the fangs, but there was something I’d missed: not obvious, especially since you only ever got to see them in the gloom of nightfall.

It was as the shuttle sped away that one of them turned its head and that was when I saw it: they had no ears. The mutations had left them without hearing. Only something stone deaf could scream like that.

Now I knew why it was called the Laughing City.

I spent a final night in it, driven mad by the noise and left the next morning.

The silence back home was a welcome relief, and as I got the news, Baw’s plan made sense.

He had financed his own army, a bunch of renegades mostly, and was rounding up all vagrants and criminals and sending them off to the camps. That was why he wanted me dead: I’d worked for him before and he was always a satisfied customer, inasmuch as satisfaction was discernible in the limited range of his human responses. But my criminal record from the old regime was the blot in my copybook and he wanted it to go away.

Baw had plans, all right, and the President had been sitting in his chair.

I knew most of the recruits, having trained and worked with them.

I also knew they were mercenaries and only wanted the money.

The army was in its infancy and hadn’t even got running yet.

But it needed to be stopped.

I knew these guys and knew they had no loyalty to Baw.

And so I took him out.

Guys like him are easy.

They never see it coming.

He didn’t even know I was back.

I marched right into his office, past the secretary who always waved me on, and found him seated at his desk.

Looking up from his computer, he let out a gasp. Even his shock looked like a lie.

“Surprise,” I said, and blew his brains across the four walls, leaving them to dry a little.

I collected my pay from his bank account, which took a little hacking into to get, and then proceeded to issue instructions from his office to disband the army.

They all got paid, of course, with a little bonus.

And that’s how I got to keep my friends on my return from the Laughing City.

Richard Godwin is the critically acclaimed author of Apostle Rising, Mr. Glamour, One Lost Summer, Noir City, Meaningful Conversations, Confessions Of A Hit Man, Paranoia And The Destiny Programme, Wrong Crowd, Savage Highway, Ersatz World, The Pure And The Hated, Disembodied, Buffalo And Sour Mash, Locked In Cages, and Crystal On Electric Acetate. His stories have been published in numerous paying magazines and over 34 anthologies, among them an anthology of his stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard Man, and The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime and The Mammoth Book Of Best British Mystery, alongside Lee Child. He was born in London and lectured in English and American literature at the University of London. He also teaches creative writing at University and workshops. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net , where you can read a full list of his works, and where you can also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual interviews with other authors.