The Cut Page 21

  I’m opposite those hollowed eyes again. I can see that she still looks terrible. Scrawny, waif-thin. Her eyes and mouth seem too big for her face, as if they’re stretching the skin to tearing point.

  ‘Marcie,’ I say to her, ‘you don’t look too good.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Her gaze, I notice, doesn’t quite meet mine. She’s always looking at a point just beyond me, or just to one side above the thunderous motorway. ‘Have you got it?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes. I’ve got it.’

  She holds out a hand. Her nails are painted a thick black.

  I put the envelope into her hand. ‘Quits now. Right?’

  She opens the envelope and peers in, thumbing each one of the ten-pound notes.

  When she doesn’t answer me, I feel myself growing angrier. ‘Marcie, you stupid little bitch –’

  ‘How’d you get it?’ she asks casually.

  ‘What?’ I’m irritated. She’s caught me off-guard.

  ‘The money. You said all yours was tied up in them trust funds and things. How’d you get it?’

  ‘A commercial transaction. All right? In other words, it’s none of your fucking business, Marcie!’

  She shrugs, reseals the envelope. ‘All right,’ she says, and stuffs the envelope inside her coat. ‘I’ll go now.’

  I don’t know what makes me stay. I could have just shrugged, said, Fine, right then, and turned and walked back along the bridge and left her.

  ‘Look, Marcie,’ I say awkwardly. ‘Is everything all right?’

  She’s turning to go, and now she turns back, her face hostile and suspicious. ‘Yeah,’ she says, scowling. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  I shrug. ‘Fine, I . . . just wondered. I only ever seem to see you these days when you want something, that’s all.’

  She shoots a contemptuous glare at me, and turns to leave.

  ‘Look, are you . . . doing anything on Saturday?’ I don’t know why I’ve asked. Maybe I’ve just got this strange desire to have as many people of all kinds there as possible.

  ‘Workin’, maybe,’ she mutters reluctantly.

  This is a surprise. ‘You’ve got something?’ I say, trying not to sound too shocked. Hurriedly, I move on. ‘Look, Imelda’s throwing a party for me. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Yes, you do that.’ The wind blows cold around the discomfort of our silence. ‘It’ll . . . have got going by about ten o’clock,’ I add, hoping for a response.

  ‘What will?’

  ‘The party.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’

  Eventually, I clear my throat and turn to go. ‘Right, then. Be seeing you, Marcie.’

  She nods silently, hands thrust into her black coat. She is watching me, now, intently and perhaps with a small amount of puzzlement. I find her gaze quite unnerving, and I keep looking over my shoulder until I reach the steps at the end of the bridge. I look back one last time, and she is still there, motionless.

  She’s got the look of someone who knows too much about me.

  I don’t like that.

  *

  I have to see Damien again, before Saturday. Obviously, there’s a lot I’m not going to tell him, but I want him to know he was right about one thing.

  I slip into Damien’s car and I feel it accelerate before my bum’s even on the seat. In fact, before I even realize it’s a different car.

  ‘What is this?’ I ask him in astonishment, marvelling at the leg-room, the tinted windows.

  ‘Like it?’ He looks smug.

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ We’re driving out of town, along the high, old coastal road, with the sea shimmering off to our right. ‘We’ll have to lose it. They might miss it before long.’

  ‘Ah. Right. You stupid fuck, Damien.’ It’s a half-hearted curse, though, sour and drippy like an ice-cream that’s been left in the sun too long. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Olympus Hotel car park. It’s the Conservative Club AGM today, didn’t you know?’ He flashes me one of his wobbly, toothy grins. ‘They’ll all be in there all day.’ He sighs with contentment and moves up a gear.

  I decide to forget my misgivings and just enjoy the ride. I have to tell him something else, though. ‘About JJ. You were right.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He sounds surprised. I realize it isn’t because he’s right – Damien just naturally assumes that all the time – but rather because I have been satisfied of the truth. He’s obviously dying to know if I found JJ in a mass of thrashing limbs and sweaty sheets in his basement flat.

  ‘I saw him buying some rubbers. Didn’t use them with me. Said he hated the way they feel, and I thought he was telling the truth.’ I know Damien cannot see my eyes behind my shades, so I still haven’t weakened myself with any confession of emotion or anything stupid like that. Wouldn’t be good.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ says Damien.

  I lean back in the seat, letting the throbbing of the engine massage my thighs. ‘Come on, go a bit faster.’

  *

  Later. The sun’s getting low in the sky. We’ve bought a bottle of vodka and it’s swinging from Damien’s fingers.

  First of all, he wants to know why we’ve stopped here, and he’s angry. I just say I wanted to, though. We leave the car in a side-lane, with the plates obscured by a few handfuls of leaves.

  As soon as I push the old wooden door and breathe the air through the crack, I know the place isn’t used any more. It smells of cloth, and that soft, pulpy smell of old wood, together with something more pungent that I just can’t place. My footsteps are gunshot-loud in the nave. Damien, reluctantly, slopes in behind me, shivering, and I tell him to shut the door.

  ‘What are we doing in here?’ His voice is no more than a hiss, but he lets the door slam with a boom that shakes the dust, and sends a fountain of pigeons shooting towards the roof. I jump, just for a moment.

  We wait, tasting the dusty air, until they have settled, cooing and twittering. And then we continue.

  The font is encrusted with splattery pigeon-droppings, white and grey and lumpy like solidified lava or something. It looks strangely bright in the feeble light which struggles through the windows.

  I stand in the nave, arms folded, and look around. ‘I just want to think for a bit,’ I tell him. ‘Bring that vodka.’

  We sit in one of the back pews. It’s quite cold, and we need our coats and gloves as we pour the vodka into the two halves of a blue plastic card-index box which we found in the glove compartment. Well, it’s better than drinking from the bottle.

  ‘I’m quite worried about Marcie,’ I tell him after a while.

  Damien shrugs. ‘People are always worried about Marcie. It doesn’t seem to improve her life any, does it?’

  ‘Yeah, but come on. You know her better than I do.’

  He sighs, and I pass him the bottle for a refill. It seems to have been nicely chilled just by sitting on the stone floor of the church. He takes it and pours, and the glugging, trickling sound echoes through the huge space. Overhead, the pigeons flutter, probably puzzling over these strange creatures who have come to invade their space.

  ‘She’s just getting by,’ Damien says. ‘On the edge, you know? One meal away from being like those creatures in the subways.’

  ‘Does she ever come to you for anything?’ I don’t know why I’m so curious, now. I’ve never really asked Damien anything like this before.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He glances briefly at me. His florid face looks paler in this place, his eyes darker and more intelligent. ‘She’s too proud.’

  ‘But she does have a job now, right?’

  ‘Am I expected to know that?’

  He sounds a bit defensive. I suppose that should worry me, but I don’t let it. I shrug. ‘Well, I just thought you might.’

  He sips his vodka slowly, the blue plastic box obscuring his face for a moment. When he lowers it, he blows a long and visible breath, like a jet of smoke. This seems to remin
d him that he needs a cigarette, so he starts fumbling for one. As he lights it, his eyes narrow. He’s obviously thinking hard about something. ‘You’re suddenly very interested in Marcie.’

  I look down, not meeting his eye. I gulp back the last of my vodka and it burns my throat, filling me inside with a prickly, acidic warmth. ‘Oh, I just . . . worry.’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ says Damien with surprising sharpness. ‘She gets by.’

  ‘Yeah, I know –’

  ‘You know she’s bulimic?’

  Well, I didn’t. But it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. I shrug.

  ‘Terrible for your teeth,’ he adds with a kind of morbid glee. ‘All that acid vomit.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks for, er, bringing that up.’ There’s a silence, broken only by the eternal twittering of the pigeons. ‘Look, she . . . did mention some kind of job. Maybe things are better for her now?’

  Damien sighs. Serpents of smoke bite at the rafters.

  I’m looking at the pew in front of us and I realize that many have been here before us. ‘DAZ, April 1995’, is carved into the wood, engraved with firm down-strokes. Next to that, in fresh-looking black marker-pen, is a jaunty little poem:

  Sex is evil

  Sex is sin

  Sin’s forgiven

  So get stuck in!

  I remember something similar from the bogs at school. Very original, I’m sure.

  ‘I don’t ask too much,’ says Damien. He’s looking around for something to tap his cigarette on. ‘She goes off sometimes, won’t tell me where she’s going. Sometimes she won’t answer the phone for a day or two. I don’t usually worry. It’s the way she is.’

  ‘She seems to have money.’

  I realize what I’ve said, now. That there is something hanging between us, between the lines, between the pews. Hazing the air like Damien’s smoke. I wonder if he will pursue it.

  ‘I said, she seems to have money.’

  He tilts his cigarette back, sucking the worst out of it in that way of his. He lowers his head again, sighs deeply. Shrugs. ‘Not my problem,’ he says quietly.

  *

  I don’t really notice how long we are in the church, but the light is starting to fade by the time we stagger out, feeling our way like the blind.

  The air tastes of a damp autumn evening, mulchy and peaty. The sun is sinking, scattering orange light through a lattice of clouds.

  Damien exhales deeply and leans on a gravestone. Below us, the slope down into the valley is thronged with the dark outlines of graves, like a watchful army.

  ‘Fuck,’ Damien mutters. ‘I can’t remember where we . . .’ He waves his hand absently in the air. ‘Left. Left it.’

  ‘Left the car?’ I offer. My head’s swimming, but I’m aware that my mouth is so dry it’s difficult to speak. ‘Best thing. C’mon.’

  ‘Jus’ minute.’ Damien lurches away into the shadows and I hear the sound of a zip. Giggling and vaguely intrigued, I suppose, I lean on a couple of gravestones – my arms round them as if they’re a pair of drunken mates – and peer at him. He’s unleashing a steaming jet of piss against one of the newer, smoother stones. I sigh in resignation and slide against the nearest resident, slumping there in the place of rest, my back against the stone, till he’s finished.

  He comes lumbering over to me, grabbing the gravestones for stability. I wrinkle my nose as I catch sight of something unpleasant and pink poking out from a still half-opened zip.

  ‘You know . . . what I don’t understand?’ Damien begins.

  ‘Usually, yes. Come on.’

  I can hardly remember asking him about Marcie. I’m sure he said something important, but I can’t remember what it was.

  *

  We move on. Time seems to come in fits and starts.

  I’m with Damien. Our legs dangle over nothingness. The wind from far across the planet hurtles into the pier at the End of the World and makes its phantoms sing, freezes our bones. I shiver, and my eyes prowl the glittering coastline for the future-ghost in her silver cloak and her shades.

  Several fathoms below us – I estimate it, the thought whizzing through my head and bouncing off the insides like a pinball – is the angry sea. High above us, a few stars peer out from behind the clouds.

  ‘Church,’ Damien mutters. ‘Why were we in a church?’

  ‘. . . phhwwwhhh . . .’

  ‘What?’

  I wasn’t aware I’d made a sound. I think back a bit. I hear myself making a strange noise. ‘Aaah. Nothing. You should’ve seen last time.’

  ‘Last time?’ He turns his head quite slowly, but I sense a twitch of suspicion – of envy?

  ‘Oh . . . forget it.’

  ‘What did you do in a church? Get married?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course . . . Christ, imagine getting married drunk.’

  ‘Mm.’ Damien muses upon this for a while. ‘And imagine waking up . . .’

  ‘With your nuptials toasted.’

  ‘Bad enough waking up next to a stumper.’ He exhales deeply.

  I roll the word around in my head for a second or two, listening to the static hiss of the sea, the water communicating with the sky. Behind us, salt air rusts and rusts the pier as it has done for year upon year. You can almost hear the metal creaking under the strain.

  ‘Stumper?’ I eventually repeat.

  ‘Well . . . you know, women . . . Sorry,’ he says, wiping his mouth, ‘but you’re not, like, well –’

  ‘Just get on with it, Damien.’

  ‘Well, you know how some are two-pinters, and three-pinters.’

  ‘I’m familiar with the term.’ I’m putting myself into Damien’s head-space for a minute or two. And what a filthy and lonely place it is. ‘You see a girl across a room and think what a dog she is. One pint later, you think she’s not too bad. Two pints later, you’ll have her. Right?’

  ‘Right. Very sick-sunct . . . Sinc-suct. Anyway. A stumper, righ’? . . . It’s when you wake up next to her and she ’sleep on your arm, righ’? And you’d, like, rather gnaw your own sodding arm off . . . than wake her up.’

  I should never have hoped for more, really.

  *

  A bit later, Damien says, ‘How did we get here?’

  ‘We got a bus back to town and . . . we walked down here.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Silence, but for the sea. Behind us, the town does not sleep. The babble and the clink of the pubs and arcades comes skimming across the water.

  I don’t know what it is that makes me turn, but when I do, something skitters from the shadows, rattling on the latticed door to the arcades.

  ‘Damien! Someone’s there!’

  His reactions are dulled, but I haul him to his feet. He immediately slumps back again, but I can’t be bothered with him. I race to the other side and in the glimmer from the shore I glimpse a figure scuttling along the pier.

  Seawards.

  Strange, that. Me, I’d run back towards the shore.

  So I give chase. My feet are thudding on the old wood. It’s almost like the whole bloody thing’s shaking under me. My throat’s acid and burning with that hot-cold sensation of running in winter air. I skid to a halt beside another of the arcade entrances. My own breathing is headphone-loud, my heart a bass boom in tune with the sea.

  Behind me, great lumbering footsteps shake the wooden floor again.

  I turn, going instinctively for my knife. A dark, broad shadow is coming towards me, the coastal lights picking out his hugeness.

  It’s only Damien. A very unfit and sweating Damien, his coat making him look bigger, bulkier, more threatening. Inside my pocket, I relax the grip on my knife.

  He stands there, blinking stupidly at me.

  ‘Someone was watching us, Dame. I don’t like people watching me, especially not when I haven’t been consulted.’

  ‘Maybe . . . they . . . were fishing.’ He slumps against the latticed iron gate to the amusements, and it rattles like gunfire as he slumps, exhaus
ted, to the floor.

  ‘You ever thought of getting in shape?’

  ‘I walk to work. It’s enough.’

  He’s a bloody liar, too. Damien’s idea of exercise is to chew his sandwiches a bit more vigorously.

  I notice that the latticed gate is loose. I kick it, and the metallic rattle bounces across the pier, across the endless sea. I prod at the lock and it practically crumbles in my hand, smearing my palm with rust.

  ‘Dame,’ I mutter to him. ‘Look.’ I kick him and he moves aside. When he looks up and sees what I’m doing, he heaves himself to his feet.

  ‘It’s never used any more,’ he growls, gesturing vaguely at it. ‘None of it. They closed it down and forgot about it.’

  I pull at the gate and it opens with a hellishly loud creak. I turn to Damien and grin. ‘Just a little look?’

  He doesn’t look happy. ‘You said you saw someone –’

  ‘Yeah, and I’d like to know what they want.’ I raise my eyebrows at him. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  Damien, breathing heavily, pushes his hair back. His big, burly body’s swaying from side to side. ‘You asked about you and JJ. Didn’t you?’

  ‘What?’ He’s irritated me, now.

  A big, wonky grin steals across his face. ‘When you phoned me on the way back from Canterbury. You asked me if they could have found out about you and JJ. Now I wonder why?’ He leans forward in a half-drunken leer, a mixture of lechery and delight at my discomfort – I haven’t got time for this.

  ‘I’ll tell you. Sometime, maybe.’

  I kick open the gate to the arcade. We’re in what is effectively the central strip of the pier, where all the amusements are housed. It’s covered with a glass roof. I look up and see that it’s spattered with dirt and pigeon shit.

  Light scatters in diamonds over ancient, still machines. It’s a museum in here, and it smells of old wood, oil and the sea. Machines stand guard. A row of old one-armed bandits like chunky, oblong robots. A little further on, in the centre of the pier, there seems to be a tank of dead tropical fish, frozen in time. The whole place is washed with a greenish half-light, as if the sea is reaching out to reclaim the place. It’s like being at the bottom of a swimming-pool.