The Cut Read online

  *

  Belinda Archard and JJ look at each other across the scratched and battered car.

  Belinda Archard says, We have to get rid of the car.

  Belinda Archard tells JJ to step right back.

  Belinda Archard gets the knife from the pocket of Imelda’s jacket.

  *

  ‘Just keep back, JJ. I know what I’m doing.’

  The moonlight is bright and cold on my knife. It’s a slice of light, white as a mother’s pride. Sliced from ice, pure and cold, the moonday light that shone on the golden helmets of Armstrong and Aldrin. The brightness that fell on Iphigenia and Clytemnestra from the flames of the towers –

  And JJ is frozen, watching, which is what he does best. He’s sitting on a flat rock with his knees drawn up and his face blank. He never really wanted to be a part of this, never wanted to come along.

  I’ve sliced down through Birthmark’s patchwork jacket. It comes apart with a fraying of threads, a rainbow tatter, and I pull it clear of the car.

  JJ is sitting on his rock and staring across the wasteland. I hack the jacket apart, making incisions from one side, then the other, then the first again, so that it unfolds into a long strip of wool. JJ is shaking quietly.

  I tie a smooth, heavy stone to the tattered rope of wool. I open the petrol cap and lower the material in until it hits something. I’m breathing hard, sharp as acid, and my heart’s hammering away in my chest.

  Then I unfurl the ragged thread, giving myself a good length, with odd bits of armhole sticking out here and there.

  I call JJ over. In a daze, he comes and squats down next to me.

  ‘Someone will find it,’ he says. ‘Someone’s bound to find it.’

  ‘Here?’ I shake my head. ‘Wrecks end up here all the time.’

  I click my lighter into action. Our faces flare orange in the dark for a second.

  ‘No one ever comes here,’ I say to him, widening my eyes.

  ‘We did,’ he says.

  His words hang in the air as I touch my lighter to the long thread of wool.

  And then the light erupts, finds a path, blazes a trail into hell. Down and down it burns, hot orange light pointing to the car. I pull JJ with me to the ground.

  It’s nothing like as spectacular as I’d imagined. When it gets to the car, there’s a brief whoomph and a flash of orange as the rest of the petrol ignites.

  I hear the windows go, with sharp cracks, and then there’s a larger burst of flame which possesses the car from the inside and eats it up. The flames, roaring like a crowd, reach up against the night sky – two, three, six metres into the air. Black smoke blots out the stars and the clouds.

  I lift my head, trying not to look right at the flames. There’s a strong smell of hot, burning petrol, mixed with rubber and metal. I start to cough. JJ, next to me, is staring, transfixed, into the heart of the inferno.

  I touch his arm, gently. ‘Come on, let’s go. It’s over.’

  Something cold and wet splashes my head. I look up. Two more raindrops hit my face.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  JJ appears to have recovered. He’s standing up, and helps me to my feet. The rain lands on Imelda’s coat, spattering it with big spots of darkness. We hold hands and run down to the edge of the quarry, the rain getting heavier and turning the dust under our feet to mud. I look behind us once, but I can’t see any smoke or flames.

  By the time we get to the embankment and the main road, it’s established a rhythm, and it’s hammering on the tarmac, making it glisten like pitch under the soft street lights.

  I realize that I haven’t given any thought as to how we’re going to get home. I look at JJ now, in the rain, our faces shiny with sodium-light and rainwater, and it seems that we’ve both suddenly thought of the same thing. We can hardly attract attention by getting a lift, certainly not the way I look.

  So we hit the verge and walk as best we can along the slippery grass, ducking into the shadows every time a car swishes past. Luckily, the approaching headlights give us adequate warning.

  After about fifteen minutes of miserable, snuffly trudging, we get to the roundabout, with its sign announcing that it’s a mile to the town centre.

  We know the way across the fields from there, and it’s another ten minutes before I’ve found the way to our street.

  We stand in the rain at the end of my road, both of us drenched, and suddenly everything hits me like a giant juggernaut and everything inside my body seems to shatter and release floods of weakness, horror, self-hatred.

  JJ holds me close, kisses my soaking hair.

  ‘Come in,’ I eventually manage to say to him. I sniff back the mucus into my nose, try and wipe some of the rainwater and salt water from my face. ‘Sleep on the sofa. Dad won’t mind, and Kate can go to hell.’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘It’s miles to yours. We can ring Imelda in the morning.’

  ‘All right,’ he says.

  *

  I let us both in, and I give JJ the bathroom first, supplying him with a fluffy towel from the airing cupboard and a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans of mine. I trot along the corridor, dripping in wet suede, and listen at Dad and Kate’s bedroom door. I can hear deep, undisturbed breathing.

  When JJ comes out of the bathroom, I’m down in the lounge, but he doesn’t say anything to me. He just curls up on the sofa. I cover him up with one of Dad’s coats, then I finally get out of the soaking suede jacket, which I throw in the airing cupboard. I go and get under the shower, which pummels me like liquid mud, warm and invigorating. Then I wrap myself in a towel, go to my bedroom and switch the Anglepoise lamp on.

  I’m warmer, but still shaking, and my breathing sounds unbelievably loud. I get myself a couple of aspirins and gulp them back with some water.

  I put my tape-recorder on quietly, playing Albinoni in the background. My curtains are still open so I leave them, watching the rain twisting the patterns of the glass, hazing the distant lights beyond.

  I sit and I sit, listening to the rain, for what seems like hours. The light shines in my face and I try and force myself to remember everything.

  *

  The tape clicks to an end. I don’t turn it over.

  I blink, realizing only now that the light is unbearably bright.

  So I switch it off and lean back with a sigh, as the rain thrums and clatters all around me, around the house and the garden and down in the Town at the Edge of the World.

  I think of the rain pummelling the deserted promenade, with no one to hear it but the sea-wraiths and ghosts from under the pier. I think of the sea, grey and foaming, eating up the land, dashing the pier and the sea wall.

  And I think of the rain screaming into the hole in the side of the Ashwell Heights complex, where the red light must still be flashing, sending out its silent signal all across the valley.

  And I think of the rain hammering down on the charred wreck of a car in an abandoned quarry up beyond the town. I imagine the metal hissing and steaming as it cools.

  And I think of the rain on –

  The rain on cold, still flesh –

  – as I fall asleep in the chair.

  Chapter Fourteen – Dreams are not Enough

  I am walking up the long, cold nave to a stained-glass window of the Crucifixion. Christ detaches himself from his cross and from the bright fragments of colour, and flies down on wings of gold to embrace me.

  As our mouths are about to meet, he throws back his head and laughs, and I see the great red blotch of birthmark, scarring and blistering his face as it erupts in smoke. Flames gush from his face. His flesh drips like candle wax on to the floor of the church and I’m covering my own face, trying to scream, trying to drag my leaden feet away.

  I turn away, sobbing, dodging the pillars of rain that hold up the roof. Standing behind me in the nave, there’s Dreads in his combat jacket, eyes white and sightless. He’s thumping a mallet into his hand again and again. Behind him, with thei
r sunglasses reflecting my terrified face, are Chewer and Grinner and Tie-dye, with their dogs straining on clanking chains, barking great clouds of blood. The rain thunders on the roof.

  Chewer, Grinner and Tie-dye open their mouths, revealing flint-sharp teeth. They exhale in unison. It sounds like a storm, like the howling of the wind.

  There’s a shadow at my shoulder.

  It’s JJ.

  There is something not quite right about him – something off-key. He turns to look at me, his eyes bright and feverish – but he looks through me, and I follow his gaze over to the door of the church, where a bright light is flashing. Orange, like a car indicator. On-off. On-off. An insistent bleeping fills the vaults of the church. Beepity-beep. Beepity-beep.

  Slicing through the scene, my alarm clock is screamingly loud. I thump the switch and roll over.

  I am shivering.

  Chapter Fifteen – Everybody Hurts

  And when Belinda Archard was sixteen, her mother died.

  Sod the false bio-data. Ghost-written in a spectral light. This is me we’re talking about. It’s me. It’s always been me.

  I hated her for it, afterwards. I hated her for leaving us and making us move away from the country.

  It wasn’t her, directly, of course, I can see that now. But my father just threw himself into his work, made all these great moves which led to his own business. Just right. Sorted. Quids in.

  It seems that all that remains of us is money. We weren’t exactly doing badly before, but now? Now we were coursing the white waters of solvency. And in the middle of the country’s biggest recession, too.

  Jon kept telling me how lucky I was to be born under a government that allowed this sort of thing. Not sure I quite believed him. I’ve got a healthy cynicism for any party that preaches basic morality on the one hand and shags its secretaries on the other. He took it seriously, though. Told me all about the strikes, showed me all the videos of the bin-liners in Leicester Square. Yeah, yeah, OK. So it happened and it was loud and it was shit and it was just before I was born. So was punk. Point being?

  We had all this money and he was getting somewhere, and he said we would never want for anything from now on. And that he’d never deny me anything.

  I don’t know if he ever wanted to meet anyone else. I’ve never asked him.

  *

  Another golden afternoon in 1992. The summer was one long, treacly string of them. They merged together into one, as if the battle in the garden had gone on for ever.

  Belinda, in her armour of dock-leaves, was sliding on her stomach and gripping a slim gun of hazel wood. The demons of the garden cowered from her – the dragon-headed rhododendrons with their spiky eyes and snapping mouths, the serrated nettle-monsters. On her way to the targets, there was always a bush sprouting papery white tokens full of seeds. She gathered them, because she knew the land where they were the currency. She kept an eye out for the advance troops, the little patrols in their armour of black-spotted red or yellow-and-black stripes. She navigated the land by smell and touch.

  The grass had turned yellow and brown. Before, Belinda had only ever seen grass that colour on camping holidays, a neat oblong of civilization/destruction left where a tent had been standing for a few days.

  Overhead, a plane gave out a near-animal groan and then its sound cut. Belinda knew that meant parachutes, and normally she’d have been scanning the skies, ready to aim at the little coloured mushrooms with her sharpened stick. Not today. Today she sat and listened to her breathing and smelt the earth and the herbs.

  When I get older, she thought, I want to get a knife. Some of the girls in school have got them. Some of the prefects, even. They have to have them, ’cos the troublemakers have them. They go round to the bins in lunch-hours and tell the Year Ten girls to stop smoking, and if one of them pulls a blade on a prefect, then they have to match it. No respect otherwise. It’d all fall apart. See what I mean?

  *

  Dying’s easy. Anyone can do it. You don’t need any special gear like guns or knives or poison. You just need a quiet place to sit and get on with it. And a weak heart helps.

  It was another summer. August, 1997. Hottest day for years. I found her sitting out in the garden – right out in the long grass – next to her easel.

  The picture wasn’t of anything in view. I remember noticing that at the time. She must have been painting from memory. It was a bridge, a big arc of metal over a river. Thinking about it since, I realize it must have been Newcastle, where she lived for a year before going to York University. There was something brick-red in the distance on the picture – maybe the roof of a house or something – and it had turned into a shapeless blot. Her brush was lying on the grass and her head was on one side. She wore a hat, usually, when she was painting out in the sun. It was lying upturned at her feet as if ready to collect money.

  Her eyes were shut, I remember. I went weak as I touched her, and I felt my legs giving way. Not just because I knew she was dead. Not just that. It was because I had looked out of an upstairs window two hours before and I had seen her reclining in exactly this pose. She had not moved.

  And the right side of her face – her normally pale, fragile face – was burnt lobster-red.

  I touched her head. It felt heavy. The sun hammered my skull. It was the kind of weather where you might be blinded in the light and shoot someone just because you couldn’t cry at your mother’s death.

  I held her face, on the pale, cold side. She looked like a red-and-white harlequin. Her right eyelid was puffed like a soaked prune.

  And then I had to let go, and a mist blurred everything, and I was running, running back towards the house with every step thud-thudding through the earth and my head and my life.

  *

  Black suited me. Mourning became Belinda. It was the smartest gear I’d ever worn in my life, to be honest.

  Jon looked amazing, really cool and calm, and not in one of these cheap rented suits either. His was Savile Row, double-breasted. A suit to keep for next time round.

  He asked me to read the lesson. I said I’d rather not. He said that was all right. I asked him if he wanted to know why, but he didn’t. In the end, my Uncle Graham did it – my mum’s brother – and Jon never did ask why I refused.

  But I know what he thought, and I let him think it. Adolescent rebellion. Going through her God Can’t Exist, Or If He Does, He Must Be A Total Shit phase. Way off the truth, sorry. Nulpoints. What would that make me? Hey, I kept believing in the Bible all through the news from Ethiopia and Tiananmen Square and the Gulf, I remained faithful during Bosnia, I was unshakeable despite the existence of Mr Blobby. So does one quiet death in a garden get me railing against the heavens and saying, see you, God, you’re a shit, you are? Really, I have more perspective than that.

  As a matter of fact, I’ve always been deeply spiritual. Even down to the screen saver on my computer – an enhancement of the Turin Shroud image, pulled off the Web. Touched up and made less ghostly, of course. And I did it before they proved it was a fake. But what does it matter that it was? Most of the trappings of Christianity – certainly in the English branch office – are fake. The most important matters seem to be stuff like who does the flower rota. But none of that matters, because no matter what transient stuff you build around them, the truths remain.

  People never believed me when I used to tell them I saw Jesus in crowds, so I stopped telling them after a while. I had this horrific paradox. I hated Christians but I loved Christ. None of the Christians I’ve ever known has been true or real – they all let their relationship with God get in the way of their day-to-day stuff, you know, people, and yet they all think they’re going to heaven at the end of it. Me, I’ve no idea where I’m going, or even if I just atomize into a void at the end of it all, and for your average Born-Again, that makes me some kind of heretic or freak. And yet I know that, if I could ever actually stop Jesus and find a moment of his time and tell him all about it, he’d be more understanding
than any of his so-called supporters. He’d probably say, ‘Yeah, well, that’s pretty normal, actually.’

  If the Jehovah’s Witnesses came round and said, ‘Will you let Jesus into your home?’ I used to say, ‘Him, sure, but you stay outside.’

  *

  As for the actual ceremony, it’s become a series of stills in my mind, rather than a continuous videotape. Just the bits I most remember.

  The heat. The blasting furnace-heat of the sun, making everything yellow and white and coating my body with a sticky film directly under all the black stuff. The earth at the edge of the grave, crumbly and dry like that powder you use for milk shakes.

  The colour of the coffin wood. It was beautiful. Dark, dark oak, polished and cool-looking, as if it would not allow the sun anywhere near. I was impressed. I wanted to stroke it.

  Jon slipping on his shades when we got back to the car, and touching my elbow briefly, and looking away when I looked at him. My sweat doubling as I felt his hand on my arm. We’ve never really done physical contact. Don’t feel happy with it. No need for it. Seemed to be more for the benefit of everyone else.

  The taste of the extra-strong peppermints we sucked on the way back to the house, to disguise the quick mouthful of whisky we each had from his flask. Not even death could break our complicity.

  And later, much later, after he’d gone to bed, there was me alone in the lounge with the debris of departed guests around me, a plate of sausage rolls beside me and a jug of lemon squash, and MTV on loud loud loud, smashing the house down, ghost lights strobing in the darkness as they destroyed the physical world. Bel blitzed, tuned-out, must have slept at some point but doesn’t know when. Kept being pulled back, grabbed by the remorseless pace of the TV. Didn’t, couldn’t switch it off, and eventually smoked the last of a dwindling batch of spliffs just to get unconscious for an hour or two.

  *

  I went away for a while. A couple of days, no more. I took all the money I had from my account and left Jon a note, telling him exactly where I was going and when I’d be back, because to have known he was worrying would just have acidified my stomach, made it all hell.