The Cut Read online

  THE CUT

  Daniel Blythe

  © Daniel Blythe, 1998

  Daniel Blythe has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by Penguin.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One – End of the World Song

  Chapter Two – Communion

  Chapter Three – Knowing Me . . .

  Chapter Four – Nightcrawlers

  Chapter Five – Blame Game

  Chapter Six – Garden Zone

  Chapter Seven – Topology of a Ghost City

  Chapter Eight – Unsound Waves

  Chapter Nine – Shopping List

  Chapter Ten – Playtime

  Chapter Eleven – The Outer Circle

  Chapter Twelve – Definitely Possibly

  Chapter Thirteen – Force Majeure

  Chapter Fourteen – Dreams are not Enough

  Chapter Fifteen – Everybody Hurts

  Chapter Sixteen – Cat’s-paw

  Chapter Seventeen – Slack

  Chapter Eighteen – Insurance

  Chapter Nineteen – Kicking into Touch

  Chapter Twenty – A Fragile Thing Called Trust

  Chapter Twenty-One – Down Payment

  Chapter Twenty-Two – Shadows

  Chapter Twenty-Three – Truth or Dare

  Chapter Twenty-Four – Unravelling

  Chapter Twenty-Five – Final Cut?

  Chapter Twenty-Six – Shown Up and Down

  Chapter Twenty-Seven – Tricks of the Light

  Chapter Twenty-Eight – Not So Manic Now

  Chapter One – End of the World Song

  Hi, I’m Bel. I’m waiting. I can taste the rain, the petrol-smoky town and the sea. I’ve got a knife in my pocket.

  I’m standing in the rain, and it’s all round me, but I’m in this magic ring under my umbrella so I’m all right. The water clatters around me. It makes the reflections fizz like on a bad TV channel.

  I’m waiting. In the rain. With a knife in my pocket.

  People hurry by. There’s a couple under one huge multi-coloured umbrella. They’re in matching raincoats – even the drip-patterns match.

  We must think about installing cable TV, he says. I know, she says, but it’s hardly a priority, and there’s that wedding present for mumble-mumble.

  Now they’re swallowed by a taxi which disappears with a vroom and a swish down the High Street – heading for the suburbs, probably, Beston Well and Beckford and High Down. Places where there are still houses like ours. Houses that don’t touch.

  There’s movement in the doorway of the video shop. I’ve been watching the people and now they’re leaving. The video shop gleams big and yellow like a spacecraft in the night. Down the dark street, other spacecraft are parked. Red-white takeaways, one club doorway drawn in blue neon. There isn’t much else. This is the edge of the world. The wind blows in from the Arctic, here, ’cos there’s nothing further up the country to stop it. Nothing between Kent and the North Pole. You carry on down the street two hundred yards, you get to the sea wall and the stacks of boarding-houses, gawping out to sea.

  There’s nobody in the video shop now, just the old guy behind the counter, so I’m going to give it a go. I’m testing myself now. I’m seeing how far I can take it.

  I fold my umbrella down, leave it at the door. Water drips on the mat. The door creaks. The lights in the shop are buzzing, hospital-white, and three screens are playing, all showing the cartoon-bright uniforms of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. The old guy looks up over his newspaper for just a second, then goes back to reading it.

  I can feel my face getting hot with annoyance. It’s as if he doesn’t think I present a threat, doesn’t think I’m worth bothering with. We’ll see. I stroll up the New Releases aisle, my coat dripping water on the carpet. Staining it dark. There’s box after box with Sharon Stone’s eyes and Schwarzenegger’s pecs and Hugh Grant’s grin and Kurt Russell looking moody.

  I stroll under the flickering screens, affecting casual interest. But my heart’s battering away. Thud. Thud. One hand in my raincoat pocket, on the smoothness of the folded knife. Above me, on the screens, Captain Picard tells Mr Riker to go to Red Alert. I rummage through the Previously Viewed. There are boxes and boxes of outdated stuff. I can’t do it with one hand and so I let the knife nestle in my pocket for now. The plastic on the video cases feels clammy, alive, as if other hands have just been here. My palms are sweaty. I can smell them, pungent as kebabs, and it almost makes me feel ill.

  Thud. Thud. Got to keep calm.

  He’s still reading his paper. He turns the page, seemingly unaware of me at the moment.

  I push my hair back, let it tumble forward as I look up and down the comedy section. I pick up a video box. Newman and Baddiel. It’s empty, of course, they’re all empty, the boxes are just tokens, in case anyone takes a vid off the shelves and runs off with it. It would be bizarre if other shops did the same. Supermarkets with dummy bean cans, empty cereal boxes, plastic turkeys, cardboard cheese. You take them all to the checkout where they exchange them for the real thing. Sometimes they don’t exchange them, and you don’t notice.

  I take Newman and Baddiel to the counter. I’m still trailing water. My hair’s sticking to my forehead. His paper comes down as I approach, and I see a wrinkled brown head, big grey-black moustache.

  ‘All right, love,’ he says. ‘Nasty night out, innit?’

  ‘Yeah, not too good,’ I reply. ‘This, please.’ I hold it up, the big plastic token.

  ‘Right – oh, you’ll like that.’ His head gleams under the lights. He’s got a halo. The three screens zoom in on Lieutenant Worf zapping something. ‘Our Tammy liked that one when she saw it.’

  He’s rummaging under the counter. I go hot and cold. Maybe he’s triggering an alarm. He knows something’s up, he can see I’m bad news. I tell myself he can’t, I look respectable enough, I’ve done nothing yet. My fingers close over the knife. I imagine the greasy prints, the thrust. I see the blood.

  ‘Course, she liked them before they were famous, thinks they’re not as good now.’ He’s grinning at me under his moustache, so I have to grin back. He’s saying, ‘That’s two pound fifty please, love. Have you got your card?’

  Oh, yes, my card.

  In my pocket. It’s not my card in my pocket, it’s my knife. My knife is my card. I want to make it my calling-card.

  He’s holding the vid in one hand, in its new, anonymous case with the shop’s yellow logo on. He’s holding out the other hand for my card and my money.

  He said something about his Tammy. He’s got a family. Wife and a daughter, probably. This is stupid. This is ridiculous. My head’s spinning now because it all seems so idiotic, so unmotivated.

  It would be wasted here, the Cut. I can’t get angry about him, can I? Just another victim in the town at the end of the world?

  I can’t get angry, but I’m meant to be pushing myself. That’s what it’s all about. Seeing how far I can go.

  My hand comes up fast on to the counter and it’s there – bright, sharp, thin. Incongruous between my fingers.

  It’s my video membership card.

  I pay for the video. He smiles. We say good night and I leave, picking up my brolly on the way.

  *

  The sea air’s cold. Tastes of fish and chips. I hurry along the promenade, where life used to be. Dark ghosts of the funfair watch me from the beach. Cliffs of hotels and guest-houses loom on my left. I walk on. Click, click. The sea washes the beach, hissing quietly to itself. The only thing that couldn’t be stopped in this dead town.

  The flick-
knife sits in my pocket, still unopened. It’s warm, now, like a lover.

  I wonder if I will find the right home for it.

  Chapter Two – Communion

  I trace the knife slowly over the photo of Kate. I’m cutting jigsaw pieces out.

  Broad, clean and sharp. I keep it sharp. There’s a man, for keeping it sharp, comes round once in a while. It has to be a man. He does it between his legs. Hooks up his bike to this contraption and shoves whatever blade it is into the works – garden shears, knives, spades. Brings them back with the best edge. One day, I’ll show him how well he does my knife.

  Kate’s gone to pieces. Kate is now fragments, each piece of her like a little coloured jewel on my black carpet.

  Kate married my father just eight months ago. They got married in church, on the altar I desecrated, that Saturday night, ten weeks ago. I remember. I cut her up now, and remember.

  *

  The church door feels damp under my hand, and it creaks like coffin-wood. I’m pulling him in behind me. As we step over the threshold, I must be nervous ’cos I feel the drink resurging inside me, acid and warm. I gulp it down.

  It’s not totally dark. They’ve left candles burning. Very thoughtful. It smells of candle and cold, fusty air and old hassocks. There are pamphlets in a rack and a font with a frilly edge like a giant grey shell. Over in the corner, dim in the orange light, a rocking-horse and blotchy, impressionist paintings on paper. Playgroup stuff. In a church? Well, who am I to argue?

  I let go of his hand, as he’s not important for the moment.

  *

  I met him in Domingo. Want to know how?

  It’s a warm night and I’m looking round Domingo for a pair of eyes. There are plenty looking at me, none of them the right sort. Domingo is full of eyes on a Saturday night. Hunters’ eyes, bright in the shadows, peering from the red smoke like lecherous demons. I’m not exactly inconspicuous. My hair, black and long and straight, is brushed to a gloss and falls to meet a scarlet crushed-velvet top, set off by a silver skirt. My silver and red earrings wink in the whirling lights.

  I am not subtle tonight. It’s my eighteenth birthday.

  *

  I’m walking up the aisle, pirouetting, conscious of my mouth open, gaping up at the squinches and pilasters and colonnades. A month before I wouldn’t have known they were called squinches and pilasters and colonnades, but I remember an article on architecture. I remember things these days.

  The altar is draped in virginal white, crowned by the two candles. They look like something Wiccan, like horns. My first thrill of blasphemy.

  He’s shuffling, hands in pockets.

  ‘Can we go?’ he says awkwardly. ‘I don’t like it here.’

  I smile and slide towards him, put my arms round his neck and kiss his mouth. I can’t taste much, my own mouth’s pretty numb. It just feels slippery. He doesn’t seem to respond at first. But he knows what I’m doing when I slide my hands down his shirt and start caressing his jeans.

  His eyes open wide in disbelief. Or unbelief. Anti-belief.

  It’s what we’re about to do.

  Acts of unbelievers.

  *

  It’s almost boring, the way I chose him. It could have been any of them.

  So I’m in Domingo, perched on a bar stool, like some farty sculpture on a spindly stand. I can feel the music in my body, as if it’s rushing into my blood without even passing through my ears. The barmaid has huge Romany ringlets and blue lipstick, and clatters with metalwork as she polishes the glasses. She’s got a gigantic cleavage, constrained by a thin yellow top, through which I can see her nipples standing up. I wonder what she’s excited about.

  He lurches up next to me. Black hair, I remember that much, and a warm, male smell like an animal. Dark jacket, white trousers. Pale skin. I recall his arms. Smooth, almost hairless. He’s holding out a tenner, waving it under the barmaid’s nose.

  ‘Bloody Mary!’ he’s shouting. ‘Bloody bloody Mary, Mary, now!’ and he shoves the tenner at her ample bust. I don’t know if it’s a demand for a drink, or if he’s swearing at her, or both. Is the bejewelled creature called Mary? That would make sense. She pours his drink with bad grace and slams it down next to him. Some of it sloshes over the edge and splatters his finger, as if he’s cut himself. He sucks the finger with meaningful anger, before slamming the crumpled note into the warm wet circles on the bar.

  I’m watching in amusement, and he turns glittery eyes to me.

  ‘What’s funny?’ he says, but it doesn’t sound aggressive. He’s got a proper, almost feminine roundness to his voice.

  ‘Nothing.’ I smile quietly to myself, shifting position so as to reveal more thigh.

  He opens his mouth. He’s drooling slightly.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

  I open my eyes wide at him.

  ‘Tequila Sunrise.’

  Mary slams his change down, pieces of silver. It trickles over the edge of the bar and falls in his lap.

  *

  I grin and lead him to the altar. The first and only time. There’s no wedding march except the wind and the rain shaking the place. The watching ghosts. With my hands on his neck and my legs round his, I’m on top of the altar. He’s falling, rolling on top of me, seems not to care where we are any more. That’s good, if it works for him. Me, I want to remember where we are. I always want to remember this. Take and eat this body in remembrance of me.

  ‘The candles,’ he says, almost in panic.

  I snuff them out with swift pinches. Let there be darkness.

  His mouth is exploring mine. I’m conscious of the heat, the liquid, but my mouth’s quite numb. No taste of anything. My teeth have gone all tingly as if from electricity. I can feel the stone walls listening, soaking up our lust. His hands grip my legs and part them. He grabs my knickers by the waist and pulls them down. I’ve just pulled his shirt open and I’ve bitten his shoulder, hard.

  It’s soft meat, like chicken, and it feels good under my teeth. They rake across his shoulder to his neck. I lick, up to his mouth, where a strand of saliva links us. Take, drink. He’s breathing hard as he fumbles to get inside me. Up in the rafters, pigeons are twittering.

  The candlelight flickers against the cool, impassive faces of saints. My eyes are closed in ecstasy, and I can feel my hair loosening, then my head lolling off the edge of the altar. He finishes in remarkable speed, with lots of gasping, but little else, and pulls out of me as if I am now contaminated.

  My body turning to jelly, I hoist myself up, kneeling on the white cloth, all sense of decorum lost. My loins feel liquid. Fluid splatters from between my legs. A runny, pinkish mixture of blood and juice. He’s pulling his trousers up, red-faced, and staggers against a pew, looking very furtive. I can’t help bursting out laughing as I adjust my underwear, and it echoes round the vaults like the laughter of saints.

  ‘Yeah,’ he mutters. ‘Funny.’ He slumps into a pew.

  *

  So after I choose him I mutter the suggestion in his ear and he seems keen, so I slide off my bar stool, allowing myself to leave on his arm, and we’re oozing through the sweaty people until we get into the harshness of the night air.

  He starts off in one direction, then suddenly stops and turns to me.

  ‘Where can we go?’ he asks in desperation.

  ‘You haven’t even got a car, then?’ This is turning out worse than I’d thought.

  He shrugs again. I want to tell him to stop it because he hasn’t got enough shoulder to shrug with, he’s too spindly and spiky. He looks like a pneumatic drill, going up and down and up and down. If he shrugs again, he’ll spike himself right through the pavement.

  I stand there, hands on hips, glowering at him.

  ‘Church is open,’ I say to him.

  He goes a bit pale. I think so, anyway. It all looks orange under these lights.

  ‘We can’t do it in the church!’

  ‘Why not? No one’s using it now.’

&
nbsp; I grab him by the hand and pull him, protesting, down Guild Street towards Union Square and the Church of All Saints.

  *

  Oh, his name was JJ, by the way.

  Joshua James McCann, ‘Call me JJ’. I wouldn’t have remembered, it’s just that he’s scrawled it on the torn-out title page of a hymn-book which he must have pressed on me just after my little service.

  I wonder if it’s ‘Call me JJ’, or ‘Call Me! – JJ’.

  There is a number on the other side. The latter, then.

  JJ wanted to clean up the cloth – he wanted to get some soap and actually wash it. I kicked him in the shins and said let them find it tomorrow, probably think it’s Christ’s blood or some other sort of wondrous sign. When actually, it’s my slightly menstrual love-juice.

  *

  In the Ladies off Guild Street, I take a hard, hot piss which practically tears me apart. The stream hurtles into the bowl, and I can feel it scouring the porcelain as if it’s going to take the surface off.

  I read all the graffiti again. The usual crap – some lesbian stuff, bits of cod advice about boyfriends. One long outpouring in blue and black goes on over most of a wall. Ms Blue, to judge from her complaints, is spineless, and Ms Black is an over-sympathetic do-gooder. I get out my lipstick and scrawl DUMP HIM in horror-letters over the whole of this closet correspondence.

  Then I shove some sheets of bog-roll down my knickers to stop leakage, snap my bag shut, hoist it on my shoulder and go home, ready to kill Kate.

  I don’t, though.

  Chapter Three – Knowing Me . . .

  I can hear Kate. I suppose I will have to talk to her in a minute, and pretend to like her. It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. Bear with me.

  *

  I wish I was a better girl sometimes, because I do love Jesus.

  No, really. When I did it with JJ on that altar it wasn’t just token blasphemy, and it certainly wasn’t a random place. As far as he was concerned it could have been in the multi-storey or down on the beach or in one of the burnt-out cars by the Undercliff. But I chose the place.