The Cut Read online

  I suppose what they’ll find inside the car is a strong smell of Dettol, maybe an empty bottle, but even if it has JJ’s prints on it, they won’t be able to match them up with anything. (He’s – what is it Damien says? – cleaner than a virgin’s cunt. These little Damien-phrases keep slipping into my mind, and I feel I have to get them out.) What else? Maybe a bit of sand. They’ll go for a stroll down to the beach and maybe find the remains of our fire. It’s a bit hard to dust for prints on ashes.

  Basically, they don’t care. They know these things happen in town, and they know it’s ‘the kids’, and no one thinks it’s us. The middle-class, respectable kids. They kind of accept that it must be a gang or two from the Fallowdale estate. The Fallies.

  It’s a huge, sprawling monstrosity high above the town. There’s this joke Damien told me when we first drove through Fallowdale, and I’ve used it time and again. ‘I can never remember,’ he’d say. ‘What do you call those little boxes that you always get behind satellite dishes?’ And the one who hadn’t heard it before would be frowning and saying, transformers, is it? Transceivers? ‘Nope,’ he says. ‘I remember. It’s council houses.’

  There are parts of Fallowdale where even the police don’t go, little sub-cultures left to their own devices. So no one suspects us, the nice kids from the big houses on the roads towards Canterbury and Maidstone. They know it must be Fallowdale. After all, they practically invented joyriding up there, and we know all the jokes in school.

  Like these.

  What do you call a Fally in a suit? The accused.

  Why’s a Fally girl like a Kit-Kat? You get four fingers for twenty-five pence.

  Why doesn’t Fallowdale have any election posters up? ’Cos they peel them off and sniff the backs.

  What do you call a Fally in a three-bedroom house? A burglar.

  You get the idea.

  Marcie, of course, would have been a Fally girl when she first came to town. I think she had a flat, just on the edge. After she started temping she got herself a one-bedder in Churchill Row, near the town centre, and got in with us. She’s got cracks, Marce, and they’ve been painted over. If anyone gives us away it might be her, stupid cow.

  Maybe I ought to see her.

  If I need a pretext, I want to see how she is, don’t I? ’Cos I’m a caring, sharing type, and I like to look after my friends. (Right, and the Pope does ads for Durex.)

  *

  ‘I want to – see Marcie,’ I say tentatively to Kate, and I’m aware that my voice has tailed away at the end, not sounding quite convincing. Even Kate knows that seeing Marcie is something I do, unavoidably, when I want to go out with Damien and JJ. It’s not usually a desire.

  She puts her blue-glass plates away in the cupboard with a strained lightness of touch.

  ‘Do you really like that girl, Berlinda?’ she asks. She always gives me that stupid pronunciation of my name, when she can be bothered with a name at all. So I’m Berlinda. (I straddle two worlds and I’ve had my wall knocked down. Yeah, right.)

  I push my lower lip out in that way people do when they are thinking about something, when they are trying to give a diplomatic answer. I never just do, you see. I watch, think and do. It’s possible to give someone an entirely misleading impression, if you really bother to study human behaviour properly. If you hate someone and want to kill them, then the worst thing you can do is to show it.

  ‘I feel I can really do something for her, Kate,’ I say earnestly, trying to sound as much as possible like one of Kate’s morning-coffee companions. ‘She’s been such an unfortunate girl, and she needs people of more class around her to help pull her up.’

  Steady, Bel, steady. This is like riding a bob-sleigh. You’ve got to keep it going, without flagging, but without taking it over too far and crashing.

  *

  In the end, I don’t go round to see Marcie. I head for JJ’s first, to ask him what he thinks.

  Yeah, it’s his own place. He didn’t want to tell me about this when we first got off in Domingo. I asked him if he had a car, and he didn’t, so that was true enough. Didn’t mention he had a fucking basement flat, did he? Would have been useful. His Aunt Imelda bought it for him, as his parents are dead. Calls it his ‘own space’.

  Technically, he lives with her, with Aunt Imelda. She’s a dead-fit-looking thirty-fiver, all rich brown limbs, designer clothes and jet-black kd lang hair. Lesbian, I think. Doesn’t bother me. She’s got a big place out towards Canterbury, and she got him this place at the Edge of the World because it was going cheap. I’ve only had one visit, and this is about to be my second.

  I kick along the seafront. A mist hangs over the grey sea, defining the borders of our world. I shiver slightly as I pass the dead fairground. It’s like some great castle of metal, adorned with lights for a forgotten carnival. Shops on my right, some open, others just ghosts with yellow boards over the windows. Funny how these dead names leave their imprints. Almost as if they’re whispering at you from the walls, to remind you of what once was.

  I huddle into my coat and hurry on through the petroly, salty air. Great slabs of lorries thunder past on my right, huge names like Norbert Dentressangle and Christian Bergansson. You probably need a bloody great articulated truck to trundle a name like that around Europe.

  JJ’s flat is in the basement. He could have had a higher one, but he wanted a basement. I know why. He looks up women’s skirts through the grille in the ceiling.

  As I come in, he’s looking up through the binocs, while lying back on his therapy couch. That’s what he calls it. I wanted to make him a sign for it, done on the computer in nice block capitals. THERAPY COUCH. But I thought it might be misleading if the subconscious were to place a gap after ‘the’, to turn it into a place where JJ took girls to deflower them. I don’t think he does that. He’s actually very shy. He’d rather look up a skirt than get up one, any day.

  ‘Hello,’ I say to him, and he waves absently in response. He’s concentrating on the binocs, with a steady hand.

  The floor creaks as I step towards him. The floorboards are of stripped, varnished pine, but not too new, it would appear. I wonder if there is a cellar underneath. I settle myself in his leather wing-chair, cross my legs (my attire today is a burgundy skirt with a matching jacket) and spin round, sighing with contentment and breathing in the aroma of the flat. It’s varnishy, woody, slightly un-looked-after, a bit like a library smell. I know library smells; I used to hide myself away between the bookshelves and read while Mum went shopping, sometimes for hours on end.

  ‘You know that’s fucking disgusting,’ I tell him, but I know I sound vague, uncommitted. I flip out a cigarette and light it, drawing in its sharp taste with relief.

  ‘So’s that,’ he says, without unsticking his eyes from the binocs.

  Three metres up, on the grating, feet thump and clatter, garments swish, no doubt caressing thighs, whether smooth as eggs or orange-peel-puckery with cellulite. JJ isn’t really bothered, I’ve discovered. To him, the flash of anything is entrancing, even if it’s just the dullest underwear of corn-plaster texture.

  He told me a story. He read about some old guy who was going round the libraries with a mirror stuck to his toecap, looking up skirts. JJ thought this was a great idea, and spent ages at the vice trying to glue a vanity mirror to one of his rugby boots. When he eventually tried to put it on, it made him hobble, and he got kicked off the bus too.

  I should be appalled by him, I should throw him out of my life for it, but I don’t want to. You see, he’s kind to me, always looks after me and conducts our relationship on a totally equal footing. He agrees with me about all the usual issues – women’s rights at work, sterilizing rapists, legalizing prostitution. It’s just that – totally separate from it all – he likes to look at bits of strangers which he wouldn’t otherwise see. I find what he does fascinating, in a way, which makes me a kind of voyeur of voyeurism. No problem with that. He does it in a really clinical way, too, experimental ev
en, as if what he’s really doing is peeling back realities that we wouldn’t otherwise find. I mean, how often do you get to see strangers’ knickers? It’s the same as the mentality which makes people look in at lit windows when they pass them, or make appointments to look round houses that they’ve got no intention of buying, or buy things from boot fairs.

  I still have to have a go at him about it, though. Sisters, and all that. I blow a stream of smoke up into the room. ‘Are you going to start complaining about passive smoking? When you’re there doing your active leching?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answers absently.

  I laugh, and blow more smoke in his general direction. ‘Whose sin is the worse, dickbrain? Don’t know why people are so hung up on this passive smoking business, I mean, I have to put up with passive God knows what other kind of shit, don’t I? What about loudmouths sounding off on buses? Don’t I have to put up with their passive bollocks-talking? And passive poor grammar, every time I pass one of those signs with the apostrophe in the wrong place?’

  This is a personal bugbear. I saw one last week – Jone’s Stationers was what it said. Now, I don’t have too much of a problem with the second word, because it could just mean they’re plural, and not that the shop is a place for purchasing stationery. You with me so far? But either he’s called Mr Jone, or the sign was done by a thick wanker. I think I know which option I would go for.

  And then there’s one of my fave expressions, ‘Jesus shit’ – that’s another problem. Is it the genitive – the excrement of Jesus? (No doubt prized above the Holy Grail – I mean, what did the Last Supper turn into?) Or is it the imperative, in which case it would be quite right to leave the apostrophe off? Or simply an adjective, as in Jesus sandals? Room for debate. Get the church on to it right away.

  JJ isn’t really listening. He’s lost in his own personal reality of glimpsed gussets.

  After a few minutes, he puts down the binocs and turns towards me with a welcoming smile.

  I don’t meet his eye, and I deliberately stub out my cigarette in the abandoned teacup next to me. ‘You can go and relieve yourself if you want. Don’t mind me.’

  ‘What?’ He rolls over on one elbow, and he looks faintly shocked.

  ‘You know, toss the caber. I won’t watch.’

  JJ wrinkles his nose as if at a bad smell. ‘Excuse me, but I don’t do that.’

  This is news to me! I thought all boys did. I always thought it must be terrible being the parents of a teenage boy, pretending not to know about masturbation and nocturnal emissions. I mean, you know that if he’s anything like normal, he’s at it most nights, tugging away, and yet you can’t really say anything. And here’s JJ, claiming he’s the exception.

  ‘Catholic priests don’t, either,’ he points out, looking somewhat pained. ‘It doesn’t do them much harm.’

  ‘Shit, no, except the odd bout of prostate cancer. You’ve got that to look forward to.’ I make a rueful face. ‘Well, you would have, if you weren’t shagging me. How useful of me.’

  I don’t think that the irony goes over his head – it rarely does – but, as he often does, he makes a show of ignoring it. ‘Yes, I’d say you were pretty useful.’

  I spread my hands, open my eyes almost accusingly at him. ‘But why? I mean – isn’t it normal? Healthy?’

  Awkwardly, he scratches where his eyebrows almost meet. ‘Suppose so. People go out running in the morning, though, don’t they, because it’s healthy? And eat muesli and stuff?’

  I agree, as I must, that there are some strange souls on this earth who find pleasure in doing such things.

  ‘Well, then. I can’t say I find that very appealing, either.’

  ‘Yeah, but –’ I slam the arm of the chair in frustration. ‘This is wanking, JJ, the favourite occupation of every randy male in the country. I mean, what do you do when you’re, I dunno, looking through a fashion magazine, and there’s some model posing in the latest designer PVC underwear? What do you think?’ I’m practically leaping out of the chair, and probably filling the air with saliva. I don’t care, I want to hear his answer.

  He contemplates it for a moment. ‘I tend to think,’ he offers, ‘that she must have had to pose like that for a long time, and that it must be uncomfortable having to wear that kind of stuff.’

  I sigh, slump melodramatically into the seat. ‘I give up. You’re a space alien.’

  I should have guessed it, actually. I mean, doesn’t this just confirm what I was saying? There’s really no sexual element in his peeping at all, it’s just childlike curiosity.

  With a ridge of faint freckles across his dainty nose, he looks like a summery schoolgirl from a teenage romance. Maybe that explains a lot of it.

  ‘Did you come here,’ he says languidly, flicking the TV on with the remote, ‘to give me a crash course in masturbation? Or did you want something?’

  ‘You should know me. I always want something.’

  He hops through the channels. He’s even got cable here. There’s reruns of mid-eighties episodes of The Bill, with lots of familiar faces running round in uniform. There’s sad Yank wankers in killer tank-tops doing ads for laser-sharp knives – these mainly involve sticking the knife face up and throwing tomatoes at it to be sliced cleanly in half, like in some circus act. It has a horrible fascination. I used to shudder at tomatoes, for a good reason.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about Marcie. How she’s coping.’

  ‘Coping?’ JJ glances at me briefly, his dark eyes perhaps rather troubled. He doesn’t seem to like the word.

  ‘I don’t think she really goes with us, JJ. I don’t think she fits in. We should drop her.’

  I realize that I have said it now, that there can be no going back. Even if I deny the truth of it, divorce myself from the intention, it can’t ever be un-enunciated.

  JJ rubs his finger over one ear, tracing its whorls and crevices. He flops back on to The Rapy Couch and has a think, with his hands folded, deathlike, over his chest.

  ‘What do we drop her into?’ he argues after a while. ‘People like Marcie –’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ I argue.

  ‘You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say, people like Marcie don’t float. They sink. Into nothingness. Unless you shove buoys under them.’

  I snigger, and it comes out as a splutter from my nose, a harsh snort of snot and smoke. ‘Sorry,’ I tell him, shaking with giggles. ‘I was just thinking about all the boys who’ve been shoved under Marcie.’ I sigh, close my eyes. ‘I know what you mean, but we’re not socially responsible for the stupid little slut, are we?’

  JJ smiles indulgently. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘You know that shop window?’

  I’m cross at him for mentioning it. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Marcie wants to take the blame for breaking it.’

  For a moment or two, I’m convinced he’s telling me another joke, building up to something. I’m waiting. I’m watching my smoke and the dust dancing in the air. I listen to the distant sounds above us. Clatter-clatter of feet, quite near, and the boom of distant voyages out on the water. Seagulls cry like babies high above the town. But it’s all strangely looped-sounding, as if my time has been suspended for me to accommodate this extraordinary fact. I try to articulate a response.

  ‘Why?’

  It’s not very good, but it’s the best I can manage.

  ‘I’ll only tell you if you’re interested in letting her do it.’ JJ gives me a grin, big and broad and white under his floppy fringe. It says that he knows more than me.

  So I’m unsettled. I’m thinking of the embarrassed way we got dressed after shagging on the altar, of how I felt totally in control of him, how I’d enjoyed pulling him to me and enveloping him in my flesh and scent, and how he’d responded like a little boy, like a teenager being given his baptism of love-juice. I enjoyed it, being the teacher, being experienced Bel, mothering this toyboy. Even if he’s only a few weeks younger than me. And now, he’s pulled the carpet from under me
, he’s rolling me up in it.

  What does he know about Marcie? Why’s he been talking to her without me?

  ‘All right, so I might be interested. Tell me.’

  ‘It’s just that, I was talking to Damien,’ he explains. ‘About what happened.’

  This makes sense. JJ and Damien hang out together without me.

  ‘He was saying about how Marcie needs some money. Didn’t say what for. But she reckons she might be able to get some from you – in return for saying she was driving the car that night.’

  I laugh incredulously. ‘Old habits, eh?’

  ‘That’s precisely it,’ says JJ, and there’s that middle-aged, reproving tone in his voice again. ‘She doesn’t want to go back to the old ways. She could sell herself and get the money this afternoon, couldn’t she? Half the guys in town still think she does it, for Christ’s sake.’

  And he channel-surfs again. Beaming American women showing off chrome-bright saucepans. Barney, the hideous purple dinosaur. Paula Abdul dancing with a cartoon, a video that’s over ten years old. And lingering, shadowy close-ups of a woman with cropped dark hair kissing her way up the bronzed, shuddering back of – another woman. JJ’s eyes light up and he sits up to watch it.

  I groan. Don’t tell me he enjoys watching lesbians get it on. What a dull, brickie-type fantasy. But I watch his face, and it’s the same as with that gusset-peeping. Not a leer, just genuine, unabashed curiosity. Peep-hole sex doesn’t seem to embarrass him, whereas the real thing – a real-life, full-blooded, pungent-juiced, hot, heaving, hands-on practical – really rather leaves him somewhat flustered. That’s nice. I like that.

  ‘So what you’re saying is,’ I venture (idly watching the two women working their way up to each other’s mouths with much melodrama and unnecessary quivering), ‘that Marcie’ll tell someone she did it, if I give her money?’