The Cut Page 22

  I move closer, my breath echoing through the hall, conscious of Damien just behind me. The shadows shift as I move round the tank, and I see what it actually is – one of those cabinets filled with multicoloured soft toys. They lie there, silent and still, a metal grabber suspended above them.

  ‘Sad-uh,’ says Damien, and his hiccup at the end of the syllable reverberates around the hall.

  I peer over the tank full of soft toys, wondering how long they have been here. They’re not especially attractive, any of them – they’ve all got garish pink or green fur, and they’re of indeterminate species.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Damien scornfully. ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I’m looking into the shadows, and I’m listening. All I can hear is Damien’s harsh, alcoholic breathing and the soft wash of the sea. ‘Come on, let’s have a look round.’

  ‘Why?’ Damien sounds bored.

  ‘Various reasons.’ I’m whispering, but it sounds amplified. ‘Because we shouldn’t be here.’ I lift my head, taste the musty air of this decayed paradise. ‘And because –’

  Laughter. From hell.

  Demonic, cackling laughter filling the dim space, reaching out from the shadows to ensnare us. It cackles on and on, and it won’t stop.

  After my initial terror, it dawns on me that the noise is repeating in a loop. It’s not natural, it’s mechanical.

  I see a flash of movement over to my left, and I leave Damien’s side to go and look at it. He shambles after me and finds me with hands on hips, nodding at the bouncing figure of a laughing-policeman puppet in a glass booth. This thing must be ancient. It bobs there, its horrible plastic face bouncing in the dimness, a ghoul guarding this lair.

  Damien wrinkles his nose in disgust. ‘How does this thing work?’

  ‘You put money in the slot, stupid. Same as anything.’

  There’s a crash behind us.

  I whirl round, just in time to see a flash of dark-green slipping back out into the night.

  I’m there, right behind it.

  The figure’s got a long way by the time I get out, but I can see him running back along the pier now, towards the shore.

  I nod to myself.

  Night is starting to envelop the town now, and I’m conscious of a harsh dryness in my throat accompanying the aches in my chest. My face feels red and tingling as I turn to Damien, who’s half-heartedly followed me out.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘what was it?’

  ‘Just some old codger. I think we frightened him off.’

  I don’t know what makes me say that.

  *

  We head back to land and wait for the tram, ready to ride it ticketless, as we know there won’t be any inspectors at this time of night. Damien’s prattling. The town’s struggling into what passes for nightlife, with taxis crawling like beetles along the prom. I’m not really bothered about any of it.

  Bel Archard is thinking, you see.

  Something made her keep stuff back from Damien, even in her current befuddled state. Unusual, that. She’ll analyse it when she’s more sober. Almost as if that beach-ghost from the future was watching from out on the grey waves, protecting her from . . . something. Or maybe it was just an instinct, just her edginess around him when he’s had a bit to drink.

  Whatever the reason, I didn’t tell Damien what I’d actually seen legging it back towards the shore. A gawky, long-limbed figure in an unmistakable snot-green combat jacket, and a harshly pruned set of dreadlocks.

  So they are watching me.

  They might be watching JJ, too.

  I’ve no way of knowing.

  Chapter Twenty-Three – Truth or Dare

  JJ’s Aunt Imelda silently offers me her joint and I take it with the lightest of touches.

  The CD’s playing So Tough by Saint Etienne, great music for this sort of thing. (I always wondered about that title. Is it an assertion of willingness to face the trials of the world: ‘I’m so tough’? Or a get-lost tail-end of a playground fight: ‘You ain’t ’aving none, so tough’?) I always liked them when I was in school, and furthermore, I think ‘Sarah Cracknell’ is a deeply cool name. Like one of those chocolates you have at Christmas with a smooth coating and a no-nonsense nutty interior.

  ‘I couldn’t believe that about the pub table,’ I tell her, ‘even from my dad. What the fuck is this, the acceptable face of middle-class vandalism? I mean, just what do I have to do to get noticed these days?’

  Imelda giggles, and takes another swig of water. ‘Kill someone, I suppose,’ she offers with a shrug and a jangle of bangles.

  I glance at her sideways; but her expression and tone are just the same as normal. Just a meaningless comment.

  Jesus Christ, it’s like walking on the edge of my own knife. If I ever thought that he’d told her . . . I mean, she’s like his mum or whatever. Or big sister, or both. I want to tell her about being at the pier, about being watched by someone who had to be Dreads. But that would mean spilling the whole sorry story, throwing it up over her like a bad meal.

  I take a big gulp of air and draw in the smoke, watching the glowing ash, and then I sink into the cushions, handing the roll-up back to Imelda.

  The room’s foggy, like some period film set, Sherlock Holmes or something. Yeah, well, he enjoyed the odd number too, although he went for stronger stuff. Like Marcie does.

  I don’t know why I called Imelda. It must be ’cos she cared about me, that time in the cathedral. And she was so good to me that night in the Arcade. I snigger, remembering how JJ was going to leave them there, unpunished. Even then, Damien and I were united in something, as were Imelda and I.

  She was happy for me to come right over, but I said I wanted to talk to her, and her alone, and asked if she could ring me when JJ was out of the house. Half an hour later, I was very grateful to get her call. JJ had said he was going down to his flat and that she shouldn’t expect him back until the morning.

  I felt a chill, of course, at the words, thinking of him there with some bimby, using the little packet I saw him steal. Or maybe even another, by now, using them up. One, two, three.

  Imelda. I almost forgot to number her among my friends, and I really should. She stares at me – her eyes rich and full, chocolatey – and I lean back and let the pleasant, swimmy tiredness carry me.

  She grins. ‘He always talked about you, yeah? In the early days.’

  I’m confused. ‘My dad?’

  ‘No, stupid. JJ.’

  ‘Ah, right, him. We’re talking . . . about him.’

  ‘Yeah. He went on and on about how he’d met you in that bar, and how you took him to a church and shagged his brains out –’

  ‘Oh . . . Jesus, I never thought –’

  I hear myself emit something that’s half a laugh and half a hiccup. The joint’s wafting in front of me again, so I take another deep drag before handing it back to Imelda. Actually, I realize, as her fingers brush my face, warm and soft, it never left her hand. I’m useless now and she has to guide it into my mouth.

  ‘He likes you, yeah? Says nice things.’

  ‘Pah, nice things, niceings. What kinda word is nice, huh?’

  ‘A nice word,’ says Imelda, and when I catch her eye, we both fall back on the cushions, giggling.

  Something’s pushed the question up, out of my alien mouth. ‘Do you know her, huh? Do you know who she is?’

  She shrugs, leaving an orange trail in front of my eyes. I try to follow it, but it’s all over the place now, a big cloud with a burning tail, same shape as the Challenger explosion (hey, I know some jokes, some really sick jokes about . . . never mind).

  It seems like half an hour before she answers. I think the question’s still booming like a hovercraft in my head, because I hear a fragment –

  ‘Who she is, huh?’

  And then I realize I have asked it again, and Imelda was just getting her mouth into gear to tell me. She takes another ruminative sip of water.

  ‘Lo
ok,’ she says, ‘far as I know, it means nothing, right? She’s some little tart.’

  ‘Tart?’

  ‘Well, some girl he picked up in a bar. Cheap little thing.’

  ‘Like he picked me up in a bar. Yeah, cheers.’

  ‘Didn’t mean. Y’ know I didn’t mean that.’ I think her hand rests for a moment on my shoulder, but it could have been the hand of a ghost. I don’t know. ‘He didn’t tell me much about what happened with you two, where it all went wrong. I didn’t ask, yeah?’ Imelda raises her perfect eyebrows at me, runs a hash-smeared hand through her gamine hair.

  Just then, the phone starts to ring. Imelda shrugs and smiles an apology, then, all in one smooth movement, flips herself back on to the cushions and scoops up the receiver.

  ‘Yeah? . . . No, of course I’m not alone.’ She raises her eyebrows at me again, and I feel myself blush slightly. ‘As planned, darling . . . No, of course not . . . Right, then . . . right, then. Yes, my love. Bye . . . Right, bye, then. Yes, I will. Bye.’ She sighs and chucks the receiver aside, not bothering to hang it back up. I suppose I ought to be flattered by that.

  ‘Who was that?’ I ask casually.

  She smiles, and spreads her arms across the sofa. ‘One of my Italian babes. Raffaella, she’s called. Always worrying her pretty head about something.’

  I grin. ‘Just how many women have you got on the go, Imelda?’

  She does a very Gallic ‘pfouilh’, with a pout and a shrug. ‘Enough! Doesn’t do to put all your eggs in one basket.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . . Don’t get salmonella.’

  ‘I won’t. I always boil them for ten minutes at least.’ She gives me one of her flash-frame grins.

  I’m sure that’s possibly obscene – she’s got quite an oo-er-missus, Carry On sense of humour at times – but I don’t pursue it. ‘You were saying about JJ, and me . . .’

  ‘Well, as I say . . . Never did ask. He doesn’t tell me everything.’

  I nod, and my head is weighted with tiredness. ‘Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well.’

  ‘Hey, don’t feel too bad.’ She grins. ‘It’s not as if he went off and fell in love with someone new, after all.’

  ‘I don’t think he was ever in love with me,’ I tell her, and I’m haunted by the truth that hangs around those words like the smoke from the spliff.

  There’s a comfortable, warm silence. I want to kiss Imelda, kind of, but she might get totally the wrong idea. Some sort of cut-out circuit deep inside me tells me that. Like it’s reminding me to be straight, in both senses. (Well, I think that’s pretty good for this time of night.)

  Something takes my mind back to the church – the churches, merging in my mind – and the pier, via Ashwell Heights.

  ‘Imelda?’ I hear myself asking, from a soft black cloud where she may also be lying.

  Lying. No lying. Only truth here.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Did JJ . . . say . . . much about that night? You know . . . after the Arcade, after you left?’

  She blows a long, warm breath. I feel it against my neck. ‘Nn-o-pe,’ she says – managing to make it four syllables, or three with a little hiccup on the end.

  ‘You didn’t ask him?’

  ‘I never ask him.’ Her voice is softly reproachful. ‘I’m not his mother, thank God.’

  I grin, and there is another soft silence. I think she puts the joint to my mouth again, but this time I barely have the energy to inhale.

  ‘Want to show you something,’ I hear myself saying.

  Before I know it, I have lifted the blade high and it’s slicing the smoky light. My knife, jutting towards her ceiling.

  Imelda nestles close to me and she looks up and down the blade, eyes wide.

  ‘Can I touch it?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Her slim fingers stroke the flat side, leaving steamy imprints. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she says.

  ‘It’s waiting,’ I tell her softly. ‘Waiting for the Cut.’

  ‘The Cut?’

  ‘It’s kind of something that I’ll know. The right moment, some time when I have to take a big decision and this is gonna save me.’

  I nod, gripping the handle with both hands. I close my eyes and imagine myself licking the ropes that chafe the wrists of Christ, slicing them to fraying cords, gashing his wrists and going down on them, my mouth red with desire. Taste of rust and roses.

  Shit, my head’s spinning with pictures. Like technicolor video. I should get stoned more often.

  ‘The Cut’s an action . . . the Cut’s a state of mind, an assertion. The Cut’s going to be the moment when it all comes out, what I’m really like.’

  What I am really like. My God. I am millimetres away – just a cut away – from telling her. From spilling the beans (in their slimy sauce) and the blood and the tears –

  I open my mouth, aware of the strange loudness of my clicking lips. Imelda parts her own lips slightly, as if to say that she is ready to receive whatever I have to offer.

  ‘How will you know?’

  The voice echoes around the church.

  It’s not a church, it’s Imelda’s lounge. I blink myself back into the world. My face shimmers in the blade.

  ‘I’ll know,’ I tell her.

  I snick the knife shut and put it back in my pocket.

  ‘Hey,’ she says with a grin, ‘don’t bring it to the party. Might cause some problems.’

  ‘Do you really . . . I mean, want to do this party for me?’

  Imelda, taking a gulp of water, giggles and splutters. ‘Well, of course, darling. If you’re happy with it.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I think so.’ I grin at Imelda, but she’s already a blur.

  *

  I don’t even remember getting home the next day. I must do, though, because I’m smashed out of a dream and my hand slams the jabbering clock radio.

  I haul myself downstairs. In the kitchen, Jon is cooking scrambled eggs in his new, ultra-non-stick frying-pan. Kate’s setting out elaborate cake-sculptures in the lounge. I exchange brief, hostile glances with Kate before slouching over to the cooker to annoy my father.

  ‘What is it this week?’ I ask him, dipping a finger in the semi-soft eggs.

  ‘What is what?’ he asks breezily, tutting and knocking my hand aside as if I were a fly.

  ‘Kate’s coffee-morning. Church, Oxfam or Parish Council?’

  ‘Try again. It’s (d), none of the above.’ Jon catches my eye for a second and grins, his whole body agitated as he gives his eggs a vigorous stir. ‘She’s doing a recipe exchange.’

  Get the cauldron out, I think. Wisely, I keep this thought in my head. I’m in need of something cold and wet in my dry throat, so I go to the fridge and open one of the six bottles of lemonade which are sitting on top of it.

  ‘Careful with –’ says Jon, just as I’ve tipped my glass back and the drink reaches my taste-buds.

  It’s refreshing, for a moment. Then it hits me, the uncanny, cloying mixture of sugar-sweetness and brine. I spit, and a glutinous arc spatters across the kitchen tiles.

  ‘Ugh! Fuckity-yuck!’ I lift the glass up to the light. ‘What the hell –’

  He looks sheepish as he serves up his eggs on to his toast. He clears his throat and tries to unfold his morning newspaper. I’m there, my hand slamming down on the scrubbed pine, pinning the paper so he has to look at me.

  He shrugs. ‘I made you up some drinks for the party,’ he says, eyes flicking down and up and down again. He can’t look at me directly. I’ve never seen him so shifty. ‘You have to be sure to get enough fluids and salts.’

  ‘Fluids and salts? What are you on about?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ He shrugs. ‘I just assumed you’d be taking . . . stuff, at this party. You know. Ecstasy. I was going to give you a talk tonight about using it responsibly. All the guidelines say you need soft drinks with plenty of sugar and a spoonful of salt added.’ He looks up at me like a little boy. He tries to smile, but it’s helpless, hal
f-hearted.

  ‘Yeah, I think they mean a teaspoon, not a frigging ladle.’ I look over at the six bottles of lemonade. I’m trying to get my head round this. ‘Are they all . . .?’

  He nods, and shrugs. He picks up a forkful of scrambled egg and chews it methodically. ‘Just being realistic,’ he says, shrugging again. ‘Sorry if I offended you.’

  I mean, can you credit it? What is this overwhelming desire to be so accommodating and liberal? Are they trying to erode every single rebellious idea we can possibly think up for ourselves? (I’m still getting used to the idea of free condoms in schools, for Christ’s sake.)

  Whatever happened to, ‘Now listen, kids, all drugs are evil, you take them and you’ll die and go to hell for eternity’? I mean, I expected that, I was comfortable with that!

  Sometimes I despair. What on earth is the matter with the older generation? Haven’t they got any sense of responsibility?

  *

  Okay. Last night. I drifted.

  I wanted to say to her: let me tell you about my childhood, let me tell you how sad I was. Lost among the goosegrass smart-bombs and the rose explosions and the pungent, laughing beefsteak fungi on the trees.

  I don’t feel myself falling asleep, but two hours later, I’m there with my head on Imelda’s shoulder and my eyes are hot as if from tears. It must have been the smoke, getting into my eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Four – Unravelling

  It was them.

  All the time. Knowing, watching.

  I have been known in too many senses, and I have been watched. I’ve been totally fucked. I’ve been unsafely penetrated by future-history.

  I’m feeling my way down the top stairs like a mad, blind woman, like a Mrs Rochester come to join in the party. I can feel it throbbing through the banisters.

  It was them. Jesus Christ. Stupid Bel.

  Take time back.

  Give me a chance to think about this thing.