The Cut Read online

*

  And so I listen to the radio, brood, watch the lights, and think. Down far beyond the town, out on the misty sea, a hovercraft booms as it heads out to fall off the edge of the world. I look with my binoculars, but I can only see the lights of the town deep below me.

  ‘It’s terrible, I’m telling you. Far worse than when I was a lad. You’re a young man, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really see that my age has anything to do with it, but I, and the listeners of Coast FM, would love to hear your views, Alan. In what way is it worse?’

  ‘All these muggings and vile-ance and riots and stuff. Young people going on the rampage.’

  Oh, great. A miserable old git, stuck beside the radio with nothing better to do than moan about the younger generation. Tell me one thing: if the good old days were so great, how come they didn’t last?

  ‘Alan, it’s a matter of perception, isn’t it? I agree that it does appear rather grim. But it might be that public perception of crime has increased, rather than crime itself.’

  ‘Eh? You saying it’s right, all this mugging?’

  ‘No, absolutely not. I think perhaps you didn’t quite understand me. You see, methods of disseminating information are becoming more sophisticated, and the chances are that nowadays, in the nineties, you’re hearing about things of which you would have been in ignorance during your youth. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘You calling me ignorant, young man? I despair, sometimes. When you get to my age, you’ll understand.’

  ‘I see. Maybe you could share your wisdom, Alan, and speed up the process ever so slightly?’

  ‘You’ll find out. When you get to my age. Think you know everything, sitting there in your radio chair and calling people ignorant what have been on Earth for forty year longer than you!’

  I feel suddenly cold. I open my desk drawer. The knife is there, resting on its bed of sliced photographs and tissue-paper.

  *

  I wake up out of a strangely thrilling dream, sweating, and damp between my legs.

  There were two faceless girls, both pink and fleshy, swimming inside a teapot, their bodies getting coated with the brown liquid and the big flakes the size of autumn leaves. They swam towards each other, laughed, embraced, started to lick the stuff off each other. I somehow knew that one of them could be JJ’s Aunt Imelda, and that the other was Marcie with her deep-bruised eyes.

  One of them, the one who might be Imelda, starts to pull long, slippery strands of seaweed out of the tea and wind it round the other girl’s head. She winds and winds until the chin has disappeared, then the mouth, and then the nose, and the eyes. The girl has a face of seaweed, an alien monster’s face. Then, she pushes her under the tea and holds her down.

  I sit up in my bed for a moment, shivering. I pull on my red silk dressing-gown – a guilt present from Cowbitch, and I was hardly going to refuse it, was I? Carefully, I patter downstairs. The uplighters are on in the hall, and the carpet, which is swamp-thick, absorbs my footsteps. I’d imagine that my father and Kate are fast asleep.

  By the long-case clock in the hall, it’s ten past two. Late, but not unreasonable. In the lounge, I lift the phone off its mahogany table and dial a six-figure number. There are thirty-six rings – I count them – before a man answers.

  ‘Yeah?’

  I am only taken aback for a short moment. ‘Well, hello there. Mr Deluxe Gloss, I presume?’

  ‘Eh? . . . Uh . . . You want Marcie?’

  ‘Oh, you’re too kind.’

  There’s a kerfuffle at the other end. Marcie comes on, her voice slurred with sleep or dope. ‘Mmm, wha’?’

  ‘You’re on,’ I tell her. ‘Fifty pounds, in cash, tomorrow.’

  I put the receiver down. Then I shiver, pull my dressing-gown tighter around me and hurry back to bed.

  *

  The next day, after breakfast, I go down to the cashpoint, draw out fifty pounds from my savings, put it in a Jiffy bag and take it round to Marcie’s. No one is in. Or at least, no one’s answering the door. I assume she’s still having a bit of internal decorating done. I drop the envelope through the door and hear it land with a thud, echoing in the hall.

  All right, I want to justify it. I have bought peace of mind.

  *

  Back home, I switch the radio on again and flop on to the bed. Kev from Sheerness is on the phone-in. He’s saying that we need capital punishment because it acts as a detergent. Sic.

  I fall asleep, thinking of executioners in whiter-than-white hoods.

  Chapter Nine – Shopping List

  ‘This Saturday,’ says Damien, sitting at the table in Dianti’s coffee-shop. ‘Let’s go for it.’

  *

  Earlier, he finishes his can and hurls it against the nearest bin. It bounces and clatters to the paving-stones. An old woman with an offensive shopping trolley stops dead outside Dotty-P’s and glowers at us. I smile sweetly. JJ shoves his hands deep into his pockets and walks along ahead of us, pretending he isn’t with us.

  JJ, Damien and I are in the Park Mall. Marcie’s not here. I think she is down at the Job Centre.

  Park Mall is nowhere near a park, and it’s more of an indoor street than a mall. It’s another one of the great jokes of this town, actually. A sticking-plaster on the urban cancer. Filled with jumpers and wooden ornaments and greetings cards that I can’t imagine any of the Fallies or the other commoners buying. It smells of fresh coffee and flowers, and the shops have smooth, parqueted floors. So unreal, and yet, amazingly, it still exists – while, all around, shops turn into shuttered spaces, burning with lurid graffiti, splashed with pungent piss and beer.

  We sit down among the chrome and Formica of Dianti’s coffee-shop. JJ has a small black coffee. I think he’s being businesslike, today. I go for a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat, and Damien, who is obviously feeling frivolous, has a great cone of smoked green glass, filled to the brim with a froth of green and white and huge globes of mint-chocolate ice-cream. He grins in a devilish way as he prepares to scoop into it. His wonky front teeth always make his grins look lecherous.

  In fact, he is being a lech. He’s watching the two schoolgirls on the next table. JJ’s noticed, and he’s sipping nervously at his coffee.

  You see, that’s one of the ways they’re different. I’ve already spoken about JJ and his childlike curiosity. With Damien, though, he knows exactly why he’s doing it. He genuinely wants to get into their pants. Some guys chat up fourteen-year-olds for the hell of it at parties, but Damien takes these things seriously, almost professionally. He’ll size up which ones are cute enough to shag, but not so pretty that they can be cocky (this, in my view, means discerning). He’ll work out the requisite amount of alcohol needed to get them off their faces but not incapable, and then ply them with it. He shared some tricks with me – and no, he’s never tried anything on with me, not once. Like, there’s the one where he’ll drink vodka and orange with a girl and keep topping his own glass up with orange and hers with vodka. She rarely notices.

  Damien’s not exactly a liberal as regards women. He had this band at school, which he’s currently trying to re-form. They recorded a song called ‘She’s a Bitch’. Some measure of its quality can be gleaned from the fact that the title rhymed first with ‘never gonna get hitched’ and later with the immortal ‘All she needs is a hat and a cat/ And she’d be a Hallowe’en witch’.

  He sees me narrowing my eyes at him, and out comes another of the Great Sayings of Damien. ‘If they’re old enough to bleed,’ he says, ‘they’re old enough to breed.’ And he grins, his teeth crooked across his stubbly face.

  JJ sighs theatrically, makes a mock-serious face at Damien and leans back with his hands behind his head.

  ‘Do you want to hear my theory?’ JJ begins lazily.

  Damien waves his spoon. ‘You never want to hear mine,’ he points out, and dive-bombs his mint concoction again.

  JJ continues, undeterred.

  *

  Let me summarize, rig
ht? Because I basically agree with him.

  Industry has totally declined in the town. That is, industry in the traditional sense. Industry that makes solid objects for people to use. Cold steel. Hard plastic. But other little industries have slipped out from between the cracks, shifted from the shadows to take their place. And they have found a way to make money out of people’s nothingness.

  Even the poor can be customers if you know how to put your mind to it. Because if you’re selling hope, you’ll always find custom. Just look at the fucking lottery. OptiMystic Meg, a load of balls and the National Anthea for a doomed land. Perfect.

  Of course, there are legitimate businesses that still survive in the town, because they do well no matter what the economic situation. Insurance firms, accountants, solicitors. They thrive off crime and deprivation. But there are others. No one can prove anything – JJ can only allege it from stuff we’ve heard in pubs, stuff we’ve picked up on our networks. Glaziers employing armies of kids to go round shops on the estates and do in the windows. Creating market need. Roofers with similar teams, armed with rocks and catapults to shatter slates and tiles. And there are, no doubt, those who can pay a monthly ‘insurance’ rate to these companies to ensure there are no occurrences of this kind. These are the new growth industries.

  Some little cards started appearing in shop-windows round the Edge of the World a few months back. ‘Earn £30 per 100, addressing envelopes from home. No typing required.’ And an address. Easy money, it screamed. People all over town must have been sending off for details, getting their bin-liners ready for a deluge of junk mail to be addressed.

  Ah, but it was better than that. You wrote to the address, and they asked for £10 to send you an information pack. You sent this off, and discovered that there was no junk mail to send: the task was to put your address on hundreds of these very cards, inviting people to write to you for information, then stick them up in newsagents. For another £10, they would send you your supply of cards and hints about where to put them up. And then you were a supplier. Brilliantly simple. I’ve always thought that if it spread unchecked, it could be a whole new subculture, and then more. There might, eventually, be more people earning from it than being used by it. My bizarre imaginings took me into a future society where no one worked, we all just exchanged cards and money.

  This is the way the world is going. And JJ and I think it’s quite funny, actually.

  *

  ‘This Saturday,’ says Damien. ‘Let’s go for it.’

  JJ and I exchange glances. I run my tongue over my coffee-roughened teeth. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’ I ask him, picking up my spoon and running it round the cup.

  Damien leans back, his mischievous dark eyes surveying us both. ‘Something new, beautiful. Destructive. Creative.’

  JJ, his chin in his hands, looks from one of us to the other. ‘I’m supposed to be going to this club with Imelda and Des. Sorry.’

  I’m a bit annoyed, and I immediately try not to show it. Des is Desiree, by the way, Imelda’s current shag, who’s lasted a couple of months – that makes them practically married in Imelda’s terms. I remember her talking about some dive where she wanted to take JJ. He’ll probably be eaten alive.

  ‘All right,’ I say to JJ, ‘if your aunt’s more important than your friends, we understand.’

  He opens his mouth, looking pained. ‘She doesn’t get out very much,’ he protests.

  Damien sniggers. ‘Comes out, though.’

  I, for some reason, grin and go along with him. ‘The closet’s bare, and she hasn’t got a thing to wear. Are all the little girlies coming out to play?’

  I feel bad about that. All right? I normally side with JJ against Damien. Course I do. It’s just that I’m pissed off with JJ today. Sometimes, I feel like he’s in tune with the oldies. Imelda’s in her thirties, they get on really well, and by all accounts, he’s polite to the various spiky-haired girls with pierced lips and ears who shamble out of his aunt’s bedroom in the mornings.

  I worry about JJ. He’s mercurial, and I have not sized him up properly.

  I’m worried that, one day, he might betray us.

  ‘So what do you want to do?’ I ask Damien carefully.

  He leans back, hands behind his head, and grins at us. ‘There’s a ready-made playground, just out of town. Ashwell Heights.’

  I can feel the smile creeping across my face, and I can feel my skin tingling in anticipation. Yeah, this feels right. If it had a colour, it’d be red.

  Ashwell Heights, you see, is what my dad and Jeff are going to put out of business.

  It’s a shopping complex that seemed like a good idea back when it was built, in the heady post-recession days. Off the main road up to Maidstone, it stands like a castle of gold and silver and glass, a monument to stupidity. Someone had the idea that you could lure people into boutiques for dried flowers and expensive cafés selling teas from around the world – if you just bunged a few supermarkets and electrical shops in with it. Kind of like a cake-mix where you think you can get your victim to swallow the arsenic if you stir in enough eggs, brandy and nuts.

  And it all went horribly wrong. What people want is everything at rock-bottom prices – which is what the Fallowdale Centre will be like, of course, only they don’t know they’ll be getting rock-bottom quality too. They want shops stacked high with cardboard shells full of cans and packets. Powdered mashed-potato mix that makes some slurpy white stuff not entirely unlike mashed potato. Sticky white bread which locks to the roof of your mouth. Beans for 10p a can, in runny orange sauce, oozing from their transparent shells as you look at them. Fizzy drinks of all colours, as bright and brash as you can make them. Frozen stuff for the kids, real food like the sort they get in burger bars, the only food they’ll eat without throwing a tantrum.

  God, you couldn’t wish for better breeding grounds for anarchy and urban decay – houses where screaming kids, high on tartrazine, rule the roost. It was never like that at ours, and it won’t be when I have kids. It may not be cool to say so, but I approve of the way my parents brought me up. If you didn’t eat what was good for you, then you got it put in front of you again, cold, the next day. I remember my dad making me eat every last forkful of some cabbage and onion stuff. It tasted like my morning breath, but it pumped me full of vitamins. And there were tomatoes, loads of tomatoes with their slippy flesh and sharp little seeds – I hated them, mainly because Petra Renwick in my form once spat a huge gobbet at me that was full of chewed tomato. The smell didn’t go away for days, but I must’ve got over it, ’cos I like tomatoes now.

  You have to admire my dad, the way he sees a hole in the market and fills it. You can’t beat capitalism these days. The alternative, to me, just means Communism, images from my childhood – tanks ploughing down Chinese students and Ceauşescu lying dead in the snow, and ancient Trabbies clunking their way round Berlin spewing out pollution. So your success in life depends on the extent to which you control capitalism. Anyone who tells you otherwise is stupid or poor. Or both.

  So, yeah, he’s going to give them what Ashwell Heights never did. A huge shopping centre full of what they want. He knows they don’t want shops that sell real stuff. They want food where all you do is open a tin or add water. They want bright, flashy video shops selling Arnie, Sly and Jean-Claude blowing baddies away and Sharon, Demi and Winona getting their kit off. They want burger bars with orange plastic tables and Kiddies’ Korners and chirpy Muzak. They want newsagents stacked high with life’s priorities – cigs, sweets, the tabloids. And in the corner – brand new, gleaming, sparkling with the hope of the damned – the lottery machine. It’s the only explanation for why there is so much of this shit. It’s what people like. Think about that for a moment. Not just ‘prefer’, or ‘put up with’. It’s what they like. Jesus fucking Mary on a bike. This country.

  Ashwell Heights is like a ghost town, fading from this world. The jewellers, flower shops and delis are popping out of existence one by one. Pop. P
op. Pop. Like bubbles on the wind. All that’s left functioning are the shops like giant arenas. There’s the huge, white aisles of the freezer centre, a remote space-station of a shop. The gigantic supermarket, with ghost bleeps from tills echoing up into the metal gantries night after night. The arcades, full of robotic terminals and pink space-age cars. The audio-video shops with their racks and racks of dummy boxes.

  There used to be security teams out there at night, but I know from my dad that it just isn’t viable any more. No one cares enough to spend the money now that it’s condemned. So the half-human creatures gather there like rats after the nightly lock-up, clustering round fires and bags of glue.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say to Damien. ‘We’ll need to get a car.’

  ‘We’ll sort it.’

  ‘But it’s got to be disposable,’ I point out. Thinking ahead, before JJ can get in. Besides, he’s sitting there, arms folded, looking at us with slight contempt.

  ‘No problem.’ Damien’s smile doesn’t waver. ‘We get it from one end of town, trash it at the other. Trash it properly, I mean.’

  My heart’s thudding hard as if with a rush of drugs, and I can feel my eyes beginning to tingle and moisten. My hands are clammy around my coffee-cup. This is going to be the best kick we’ve had in ages.

  The point isn’t to steal anything or trash anything, the point is just to go there and do whatever feels good. You don’t know where the edge is until you ride out to it. This is where I find the problem with Damien – he thinks in mercenary terms. He’ll be wanting to grab CDs and stuff. Still, I can cope with that.

  JJ’s got his detached face on again. So, what is it this time, I wonder?

  Damien leans forward so that his nose is just a few centimetres from mine. ‘I’ve got a condition,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Don’t think I want to know. Does it involve lice?’

  ‘A prerequisite, all right?’ He leans back, drawing breath in from between his teeth. ‘Marcie comes.’

  ‘Oh, for-fucking-get it.’ The adrenalin rush turns to cramp inside me. I turn away from him in disgust, shifting position in my chair. I reach for my coffee, but there’s just a congealed brown sludge in the bottom of the cup by now.