So this isn’t so much a blog post as my Open University coursework. Thoughts are appreciated.
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He has the look of a man who has invested too much. Forearms on the railing, he watches the bodies in the dark. Three people for every square meter, crammed up against each other. The bass is humming through all of them, vibrating each one at exactly the same frequency. Over and over, he runs through what would happen if one person panicked. He saw the fear spread like a contagion through the crowd, saw a man push a young woman in a dress to the ground in his rush to get out. He saw her fall, and then saw her dancing with her friends. He does this every night, testing the limits of his liability, looking for every way to change the numbers. There is no chance to get this wrong. The looming spectre of his divorce means this is soon all he will have, the three-quarter-share of a club he bought before he married a woman only three inches deep and fathered two daughters he never quite managed to raise right. He rolls his aching shoulders.
Opening his desk drawer, he takes out a plastic packet. He throws his shirt in the paper bin and shakes the cardboard from the new one, pulling it on and covering the fold creases with his blazer. It was time to put on the show. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a little ball of clingfilm and shook the contents onto the table top. He liked to watch the dancers as he came up, leeching their joy and their anxiety and their lust into his synthetic high. Lately he’d been distracted by the lights. Or, more precisely, the space between the lights. The brief half-second of darkness nestled between the strobes drew him in. He watched for it, looking for the black between the white. It felt like running towards the edge of a crevasse, a headlong rush to the distant nothing. Some nights he got right to the edge and had to wrench himself away. He just knew it would be worse than bad if he fell in. Still, it was the perfect way to escape from the reality of the sleeping bag in the corner of the room, if only for a few minutes.
The smell of piss and bleach crawls up his nostrils and slides down the back of his throat. The door swings shut as he unzips and lets go. The ecstasy of his release is momentarily marred by the sight of his face in the mirror. The months of working and sleeping and eating in the same place had left the skin around his cheekbones hanging a little sallower. The hours of pouring over the accounts that had accompanied those months and the years of arguing that had preceded them had darkened the skin beneath his eyes. He stares long and hard and convinces himself that you’d have to look closely to notice, that the spark is still in his eye and his smile still winning. He can feel the tingle beneath his skin as the drugs take hold. He shakes twice and his zip sticks. A door creaks behind him. He frees his zip.
The mirror comes towards his face inordinately fast. He barely has time to breathe. As the glass crunches against his nose and splits his cheek, he becomes aware of the hand against the back of his head. Time trickles to an almost-stop as the adrenaline surges to meet the amphetamine already in his blood. He glimpses a leather jacket behind him through blood blurred eyes. He knows the nose from somewhere. He can’t help but notice that its owner hasn’t shaved as the hand pulls his head back from the mirror. He almost has time to think that it’s funny how the brain works before the mirror is anxious to make his acquaintance once more and the world hurtles back into its correct time perspective. Ignoring the tearing feeling at the back of his head, he flails around for his assailant. He finds something soft and presses. Hard. He illicits a shriek and wrenches free. Connecting a punch at the head behind the hands, he sends his attacker reeling into the tiles and slumps against the toilet wall. Watching the crumpled heap on the floor, his breathing comes fast and shallow, blood running down his face and into his mouth. He turns his head to spit and feels his entire weight lurch to the left as his leg disappears from under him. The foot that hit the back of his knee isn’t fast enough not to be trapped between his thigh and his calf. The foot’s twin lands square on his hips, dislodging its partner. He struggles to stay up, brain scrabbling to figure out what the fuck is going on. He launches himself at the oncoming mass of leather and skin. Everything happens at once, everything and nothing, they wrestle across most of the floor but get nowhere. His head snaps back as a fist lands on his cheek.
He tries to move but the other man’s weight is pinning him down. He’s not sure how he ended up with this guy kneeling on the back of his neck. He’s not sure how he ended up here at all. He doesn’t remember much of the last five minutes, and he’s not sure he wants to remember much of the last five years. It floats before him anyway. He feels almost serene, his flailing limbs entirely separate from his mind. No. This cannot be how it is. He hasn’t been through hell to die on a toilet floor. He lets all his air out and slows his thrashing to a perfect still. After a few seconds the pressure on his neck lifts and he has to fight the urge to gulp down air. Instead, he sucks in a few shallow breaths as slowly and quietly as he can. A heavy boot lands in his ribs and his eyes nearly snap open. He can hear the leather jacket push open a cubicle door, hears a zip and the sound of his assailant’s relief. Pushing up off the floor as quietly as he can, he steps around the mirror shards and takes a deep breath with his back to the cubicle wall. He waits until the man is finished, steps into the cubicle and slams his unshaven face onto the cistern. The man struggles, and the last of the chemical cocktail roars in his bloodstream.
He is holding a wet mop of hair in the toilet bowl. Nothing has moved in the bathroom for three minutes and forty two seconds. He lets out the breath he has been holding and begins to shake. He lets go of the head and sits there for an eternity longer, before grasping the baggy folds of the leather jacket’s shoulders. With great difficulty he wrestles the dead weight onto the floor and turns him over.
Staring at the unshaven face, the memorable nose, the tattoos on the neck, he feels the unquenchable urge to vomit and takes the place vacated by the dead man.
He turns the knife over and over in his hands. The harlot had sent her toyboy to kill him. He turned this over and over in his mind in time with the knife. They had had a rough time of it, sure, but he had never thought it was this bad. Bad enough to kill him. In the small hours of the morning he had hoped it had not been nearly so bad at all. He had never dared think that she would send her boyfriend to his toilet with a knife. He looked at Alex and saw the youthful eyes behind the broken nose. He slips and cuts his hand, deep enough to realise he has been in the bathroom for over half an hour.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so bleak. Holding the dead man by an armpit and with a knee in his crotch, he was drying Alex’s hair under a hand dryer. He had a plan.
Lurching down the hallway, it will look like he is throwing out a drunk. Mercifully, his charade doesn’t have to pass inspection and he shoulders open the fire escape. The music from the club thumps in the alleyway. He leans Alex’s weight against the side of his Toyota and opens the boot. When he closes it again he is breathing hard. He puts his hand on the wall of the club and closes his eyes: for a few moments the music flows through him like every carefree dancer inside.
He is looking for the darkness between the light again, waiting for it to be longer. The headlights wash across his face less frequently the further he drives. He drove aimlessly for forty nine minutes before he knew where to go. He tried turning the music up to drown out his thoughts but found they only got louder. He settles on opening all the windows and driving at ninety miles an hour. He is driving home. And as he drives he has to think. He has thought about a hundred different ways to get away from the body in his boot. He has thought about what will happen when Alex doesn’t go home. He has thought about why Alex came to find him tonight at all. The one time they had met, he seemed too lazy for jealous rage, and too stupid for a power play. He seemed like a, if not nice then, naïve guy. He was good with the girls at least, although that was probably because he was about twelve. It had to have come from her. It took him from Meopham to Sevenoaks to figure out why. He has to pull over and get out and kick the tyre. Twice. He cannot believe that she could be so stupid, that he could be so stupid as to love her. He had loved her when she suggested he sold his share in the club to one of the bigger clubs. He had loved her when she spent a month dropping hints about a theatre friend of hers who was looking for a venue. He had still loved her when she put the papers for the 48 one-and-two- bed apartments with the onsite pool and gym complex in front of him and yelled blue bloody murder for him to give up his father’s business. He even loved her when she came to him on the sofa in the middle of the night and gave him those other papers and the black bags and made him leave before the girls got up. He stops loving her on a roundabout a few minutes off the A21.
As he half carries and half drags a dead man through the woods, he considers what to do. His plan will only take him as far as the next fifteen minutes. After that stretches an amorphous blob of fear and uncertainty. And so he begins to consider. He considers Spain, considers going back to the club and pretending nothing’s happened, considers ditching his car on the side of the road and walking into the middle of the night. When Alex slides from his grip he considers what will happen to his daughters. For a while, he just carries and considers.
Standing on the shore of the lake he skipped stones on as a kid, in the middle of the night, with a dead body at his feet, he breathes in as deep as he can. He believes for one quiet moment that if he breathes in deep enough and closes his eyes and hopes he will be seven years old again. But he is not. So he resigns himself to his plan with an exhalation and rolls Alex onto the makeshift raft he foraged. He wades with the raft until he is up to his waist. The water is cold, like he expected, but it is cleansing. He says a prayer even though he does not believe in God and doesn’t know whether he’s saying it for himself or Alex or his children. He empties the contents of the petrol can onto the body, pushes it out and flings a match after it. He stands in the water until his feet go numb, watching the body burn. Watching Alex burn. He knows what to do.
As he climbs back into the driving seat he catches a sight of himself in the rearview mirror. He has the look of a man who has invested too much.
“Enough.”
