Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Walking Wounded MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

When after two days the discomfort in his side had not stopped, merely mutated, Richard began to get mildly concerned. It didn’t hurt as often as it had at first, and he could make a wider range of movements without triggering it; but when the pain did come it was somehow deeper, as if settled into the bone.

Christine’s answer to the problem was straightforward, and strident in its logic and delivery. He should go to Casualty, or at the very least to the doctor’s surgery which was just opposite their new flat in Kingsley Road. Richard’s view, though unspoken, was just as definite: bollocks to that. There were more than enough dull post-move tasks to be endured without traipsing up to the Royal Free and sitting with stoic old women and bleeding youths in a purgatory of peeling linoleum. As they were now condemned to living on a different branch of the Northern line to Hampstead, it would require two dogleg trips down to Camden and back out again — together with a potentially limitless spell on a waiting-room bench — and burn up a whole afternoon. Even less appealing, for some reason, was the prospect of going just across the road and explaining in front of an audience of whey-faced locals that he had been living somewhere else, now lived just across the road, and wished to both register with the doctor and have his apathetic opinion on a rather unspecific pain in Richard’s side. And that he was very sorry for being middle-class and would they please not beat him up.

He couldn’t be bothered, in other words, and instead decided to dedicate Monday to taking a wide variety of objects out of cardboard boxes and trying to work out where they could be least unattractively placed. Christine had gone back to work, at least, which meant she couldn’t see his occasional winces or hear the swearing which greeted every new object for which there simply wasn’t room.

The weekend had been hell, and not just because Richard hadn’t wanted to move in the first place. Or rather he had, in one way; he had believed that they should move, instead of actually wanting to. It had come to him one night lying in bed in the flat in Belsize Park, listening to the even cadence of Chris’s breathing and wondering at what point in the last couple of months they had stopped falling asleep together. At first they’d drifted off simultaneously, facing each other, four hands clasped into a declaration, determined not to leave each other even for the hours they spent in another realm. Richard half-remembered a poem by someone long dead — Herrick, possibly? — the gist of which had been that though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one is hurled into a several world. Well it hadn’t been that way with them, not at first. Yet after nine months there he was, lying awake, happy to be in the same bed as Chris but wondering where she was.

Eventually he’d got up and wandered through into the sitting-room. In the half-light it looked the same as it always had. You couldn’t see which pictures had been taken down, which objects had been removed from shelves and hidden in boxes at the bottom of cupboards. You couldn’t tell that for three years he had lived there with someone else.

But Richard knew that he had, and so did Christine. As he gazed out over the garden in which Susan’s attempts at horticulture still struggled for life in the face of their joint indifference, Richard finally realized that they should move. Understood, suddenly and with cold guilt, that Chris probably didn’t like living here. It was a lovely flat, with huge rooms and high ceilings. It was on Belsize Avenue, which meant not only was it within three minutes’ walk of Haverstock Hill, with its cafés, stores and Tube station, but Belsize ‘village’ was just around the corner. A small enclave of shops specifically designed to cater to the needs of the local well-heeled, the village was so comprehensively stocked with pâtés, wine, videos and magazines that you hardly ever actually needed to go up to Hampstead, itself only a pleasant ten minutes’ walk away. The view from the front of the flat itself was on to the Avenue, wide and spaced with ancient trees. The back was on to a garden neatly bordered by an old brick wall, and although only a few plants grew with any real enthusiasm the general effect was still pleasing.

But the view through Christine’s eyes was probably different. She perhaps saw the local pubs and restaurants in which Richard and Susan had spent years of happy evenings. She maybe felt the tightness with which her predecessor had held Richard’s hand as they walked down to the village, past the gnarled mulberry tree which was the sole survivor of the garden of a country house which had originally stood there. She certainly wondered which particular patches of carpet within the flat had provided arenas for cheerful, drunken sex. This had come out one night after they had come back from an unsuccessful dinner party at one of Chris’s friends, both rather drunk and irritable. Richard had been bored enough by the evening to respond angrily to the question, and the matter had been dropped. Standing there in the middle of the night, staring around a room stripped of its familiarity by darkness, he remembered the conversation, the nearest thing they’d yet had to a full-blown argument. For a moment he saw the flat as she probably did, and almost believed he could hear the rustling of gifts from another woman, condemned to storage but stirring in their boxes, remembering the places where they had once stood.

The next morning, over cappuccinos on Haverstock Hill, he’d suggested they move. At the eagerness of her response he felt a band loosen in his chest that he hadn’t even realized was there, and the rest of the day was wonderful.

Not so the move. Three years’ worth of flotsam, fifty boxes full of stuff. Possessions and belongings which he’d believed were individual objects metamorphosed into generic shite which had to be manhandled and sorted through. The flat they’d finally found to move into was tiny. Well, not tiny; the living room and kitchen were big enough, and there was a roof garden. But a good deal smaller than Belsize Avenue, and nearly twenty boxes of Richard’s stuff had to go into storage. Books which he seldom looked at, but would have preferred to have around; videos which he didn’t want to watch next week, but might in a couple of months; old clothes which he never wore but which had too much sentimental value to be thrown away. And, of course, the Susan collection. Objects in boxes, rounded up and buried deeper by putting in further boxes, then sent off to be hidden in some warehouse in Kings Cross. At a cost of fifteen pounds a week this was going to make living in the new flat even more expensive than the old one — despite the fact it was in Kentish Town and you couldn’t buy chicken liver and hazelnut pâté for love or money.

On Friday night the two of them huddled baffled and alone in the huge living room in Belsize Avenue, surrounded by mountains of cardboard. They drank cups of coffee and tried to watch television, but it was as if the flat had already taken its leave of them. When they went to bed it was if they were lying on a cold hillside in a country where their visa had expired.

The next morning two affable Australians arrived with a van the size of Denmark, and Richard watched, vicariously exhausted, as they trotted up and down the stairs, taking his life away. Chris bristled with female cleaning know-how in the kitchen, periodically sweeping past him with a damp cloth in her hand, humming to herself. As the final pieces of furniture were dragged away Richard tried to say goodbye to the flat, but the walls stared back at him with vacant indifference, and offered nothing more than dust in corners which had previously always been hidden. Dust, some particles of which were probably Susan’s skin — and his and Chris’s, of course. He left to the sound of a Hoover, and followed the van to their new home.

Where, it transpired, his main bookcase could not be taken up the stairs. The two Australians, by now rather bedraggled and hot, struggled gamely in the dying light but eventually had to confess themselves beaten. Richard, by now rather depressed, allowed them to put the bookcase back in the van, to be taken off with the other storage items. Much later he held out a tenner to each of them, watched the van squeeze off down the narrow road, and then turned and walked into his new home.

Chris was still at Belsize Avenue, putting the finishing touches to the cleaning and negotiating with the old twonk who owned the place. While he waited for her to arrive, Richard moved a few boxes around, not wanting to do anything significant before Chris was there to share it with him, but too tired to simply sit still. The lower hallway was almost completely impassable, and he resolved to carry a couple of boxes up to the living room. It was while he was struggling up the stairs with one of them that he hurt himself.

He was about halfway up, panting under a box which seemed to weigh more than the house itself, when he slipped on a cushion lying on the stairs. Muscles which he hadn’t used since his athletic glory days at school kicked into action, and he managed to avoid falling but collided heavily with the wall instead. The corner of the box he was carrying crunched solidly into his ribs. For a moment the pain was startling, and a small voice in his head said, ‘Well, that’s done it.’

He let the box slide to the floor and stood panting for a while, fingers tentatively feeling for what he was sure must be at least one broken rib. He couldn’t find anything which gave more than usual, and after a recuperative cigarette carefully pushed the box the rest of the way up the stairs. Half an hour later Chris arrived, happily cross about their old landlord’s attempts to whittle money off their deposit, and set to work on the kitchen.

They fell asleep together that night, three of their hands together; one of Richard’s unconsciously guarding his side.

The next morning it hurt like hell, but as a fully-fledged male Richard knew how to deal with this: he ignored it. After four days of looking at the cardboard boxes cheerfully emblazoned with the logo of the removal firm, he had begun to hate the sight of them, and concentrated first on unpacking everything so he could be rid of them. In the morning he worked in the living room, listening to the sound of Chris whistling in the kitchen and bathroom, those female domains. He discovered that two of the boxes shouldn’t even have been there at all, but were supposed to have been taken with the others and put in storage. One was full of computer manuals for software he either never used or knew back to front; the other was a box of Susan Objects. As he opened it, Richard realized why it had hurt quite so much when making contact with his ribs: it contained, amongst other things, a heavy and angular bronze which she had made and presented to him. He was lucky it hadn’t impaled him.

As it wasn’t worth calling the removal men out to collect the boxes, they both ended up in his microscopic study, squatting on top of the filing cabinet. More precious space taken up by stuff which shouldn’t even be there; either in the flat or in his life.

The rest of the weekend disappeared into a blur of tidal movement and pizza. Objects migrated from room to room, in smaller and slower circles, until they finally found their new nesting places. Chris efficiently unpacked all the clothes and put them in the fitted wardrobes, cooing over the increase in hanging space. Richard tried to organize his books into his decreased shelving space, eventually having to lay many of them on their side and pile them up vertically. He set his desk and computer up, and checked his e-mail, obscurely irritated to find that no one had tried to contact him in the couple of days he’d been off-line.

By Monday most of it was done, and Richard spent the morning trying to turn his study into a habitable room by clearing the few remaining boxes. At eleven Chris called from work, cheerful and full of vim, and he was glad to sense that the move had made her happy. As they were chatting he realized that he must at some point have scraped his left hand, because there were a series of shallow scratches, like paper cuts, over the palm and underside of the fingers. They hardly seemed significant against the pain in his side, and aside from washing his hands when the conversation was over, he ignored them.

In the afternoon he took a break and walked down to the local corner store for some cigarettes. It was only his second visit, but he knew he’d already seen all it had to offer. The equivalent store in Belsize Village had stocked American magazines, fresh-baked bread and three different types of pesto. Next door had been a delicatessen with home-made duck’s liver and port pâté to die for. ‘Raj’s EZShop’ sold none of these things, and instead concentrated rather single-mindedly on the pot noodle and toilet roll end of the market. When he left the shop Richard went and peered dispiritedly at the grubby menu hanging in the window of the restaurant opposite. Eritrean food, whatever the hell that was. One of the dishes was described as ‘three pieces of cooked meat’, which seemed both strangely specific and uncomfortingly vague.

Huddling into his jacket against the cold, Richard turned and walked for home, feeling — he imagined — rather like a deposed Russian aristocrat, allowed to live after the revolution but condemned to lack everything which he had once held dear. The sight of a small white dog scuttling by seemed only to underline his isolation.

When Chris returned at six she couldn’t understand his quietness, and he didn’t have the heart to try to explain it to her.

‘What’s that?’

The answer, Richard saw, appeared to be that it was a scratch. About four inches long, it ran across his chest directly over his heart. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it seemed to have healed and thus must have been there for a day or two.

‘Another souvenir from the move,’ he said. It was after midnight and they were lying in bed, having just abandoned an attempt to make love. It wasn’t that there was any lack of enthusiasm — far from it — simply that the pain in Richard’s ribs was a bit too bracing to ignore. He was fine so long as he kept his chest facing directly forwards, but any twisting and it felt as if someone was stoving in his rib cage with a well-aimed boot. ‘And no, I’m not going to the doctor about it.’

Chris smiled, started to tickle him, and then realized she shouldn’t. Instead she sighed theatrically and kissed him on the nose before turning to lie on her side.

‘You’d better get well soon,’ she said, ‘Or I’m going to have to buy a do-it-yourself book.’

‘You’ll go blind,’ he said, turning off the bedside light, and she giggled quietly in the dark. He rolled gingerly so that he was snuggled into her back, and lightly stroked her shoulder, waiting for sleep. After a moment he noticed a wetness under his hand, and stopped, pulling his hand out from under the duvet. In the threadbare moonlight he confirmed what he’d already suspected. Earlier in the evening he’d noticed that the little cuts seemed to be exuding tiny amounts of blood. It was still happening. Constantly being reopened when he lugged boxes around, presumably.

‘S’nice,’ Chris murmured sleepily. ‘Don’t stop.’

Richard slid his hand back under the duvet and moved it gently against her shoulder again, using the back of his fingers and cupping his palm away from her.

The bathroom, though tiny, was very adequately equipped with mirrors, and Richard couldn’t help noticing the change as soon as he took off his dressing gown the next morning.

There was still no sign of bruising over his ribs, which worried him. Something which hurt as much as that ought to have an external manifestation, he thought, unless it indicated internal damage. The pain was a little different this morning, less like a kicking, more as if two of the ribs were moving tightly against each other, a kind of cartilaginous twisting.

There were, however, a number of new scratches. Mostly short, they were primarily congregated over his stomach and chest. It looked as though a cat with its claws out had run over him in the night. As they didn’t have a cat that seemed unlikely, and Richard frowned as he regarded himself in the mirror.

Also odd was the mark on his chest. Perhaps it was just seeing it in proper light, but this morning it looked rather more than just a scratch. By spreading his fingers out on either side Richard found he could pull the cut slightly apart, and that it was a millimetre or so deep. When he allowed it to close again it did so with a faint liquidity, the sides tacky with lymph. It wasn’t healing properly. In fact — and Richard held up his left hand to confirm this — it was doing the same as the cuts on his palm. They too seemed as fresh as the day before — if not a little fresher.

Glad that Chris had left the house before he’d made it out of bed, Richard quickly showered, patting himself dry around the cuts, and covered them with clothes.

By lunchtime the flat was finally in order, and Richard had to admit that parts of it looked pretty good. The kitchen was the one room which was bigger than he’d been used to, and with the late morning light slanting into it, was very attractive. The table was a little larger than would have been ideal, but at least you could get at the fridge without performing contortions. The living-room upstairs also looked pretty bijou, if you ignored the way in which his books were crammed into the bookcases. Chris had already established a nest on the larger of the two sofas; her book, ashtray and an empty coffee mug placed within easy reach. Richard perched on the other sofa for a while, eyes vaguely running over his books and realizing he ought to make an effort to colonize a corner of the room for his own.

Human, All Too Human.

The title brought Richard out of his reverie. A secondhand volume of Nietzsche, bought for him as a joke by Susan. It shouldn’t have been on the shelf, but in one of the storage boxes. Chris didn’t know it had been a present, but then it hadn’t been Chris who’d insisted he take the other stuff down. It had simply seemed to be the right thing to do, and Richard had methodically worked around the old flat hiding things the day before Chris moved in. Hiding them from whom, he hadn’t been sure. It had been six months since he and Susan had split up, and she wasn’t even seeing the man she’d left him for any more. To have the old mementoes still out didn’t cause him any pain, and he’d thought he’d put them away purely out of consideration for Chris.

But as he looked over the bookcase he realized how much the book of Nietzsche stood out in their new flat. It smelled of Susan. Some tiny part of her, some speck of skin or smear of oil, must surely still be on it somewhere. If he could sense that, then surely Chris could as well. He walked across the room, took the book from the shelf, and walked downstairs to put it in the box on top of his filing cabinet in the study.

On the way he diverted into the bathroom. As he absently opened his fly, he noticed an unexpected sensation at his fingertips. He brushed them around inside his trousers again, trying to work out what he’d felt. Then he slowly removed them, and held his hand up.

His fingers were spotted with blood.

Richard stared coldly at them for a while, and then calmly undid the button of his trousers. Carefully he lowered them, and then pushed down his boxer shorts.

More cuts.

A long red line ran from the middle of his right thigh around to within a couple of inches of his testicles. A similar one lay across the very bottom of his stomach. A much shorter but slightly deeper slit lay across the base of his penis, and it was from this that the majority of the blood was flowing. It wasn’t a bad cut, and hardly put one in mind of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but Richard would have much preferred it not to have been there.

Looking up at the mirror above the toilet, he reached up and undid the buttons on his shirt. The scratches on his stomach now looked more like cuts, and a small thin line of blood rolled down from the cut on his chest.

Like many people, Richard wasn’t fond of doctors. It wasn’t so much the sepulchral gloom of waiting rooms he minded, or the grim pleasure their receptionists took in patronizing you. It was mainly the boredom and the sense of potential catastrophe, combined with a knowledge that there wasn’t a great deal they could do. If you had something really bad, they sent you to a hospital. If it was trivial, chances were it would go away of its own accord. It was partly for these reasons that Richard simply did his shirt and trousers back up again, after patting at some of the cuts with pieces of toilet paper. It was partly also because he was afraid. He didn’t know where the scratches were coming from, but the fact that, far from healing, they seemed to be getting worse, was worrying. With his vague semi-understanding of such things he wondered if it meant his blood had stopped clotting, and if so, what that meant. He didn’t think you could suddenly develop haemophilia. It didn’t seem very likely. But what then? Perhaps he was tired, run-down after the move, and that was making a difference.

In the end he resolved to just go on ignoring it a little longer, like a mole which keeps growing but which you don’t wish to believe might be malignant. He spent the afternoon sitting carefully at his desk, trying to work and resisting the urge to peek at parts of his body. It was almost certainly his imagination, he believed, which made it feel as if a warm, plump drop of blood had sweated from the cut on his chest and rolled slowly down beneath his shirt; and the dampness he felt around his crotch was the result of his having turned the heating up high.

Absolutely.

He took care to shower well before Chris was due home. The cuts were still there, and had been joined by another on his upper arm. When he was dry he took some surgical dressing and micropore tape from the bathroom cabinet and covered the ones which were bleeding most. He then chose his darkest shirt from the wardrobe and sat in the kitchen, waiting for Chris to come home. He would have gone upstairs, but didn’t really feel comfortable up there by himself yet. Although most of the objects in the room were his, Chris had arranged them, and the room seemed a little forlorn without her to provide their underlying structure.

That evening they went out to a pub in Soho, a birthday drink for one of Chris’s mates. Chris had several different groups of friends, Richard had discovered. He had also discovered that the ones she regarded as her closest were the ones he loathed the most. It wasn’t because of anything intrinsically unpleasant about them, more their insufferable air of having known each other since before the dawn of time, like some heroic group of Knights of the Pine Table. Unless you could remember the hilarious occasion when they all went down to the Dangling Cock in Mulchester and good old ‘Kipper’ Philips sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ straight through while lying on the bar with a pint on his head before going on to amusingly prang his father’s car on the steps of the village church, you were clearly no more than one of life’s spear carriers — even after you’d been going out with one of them for nearly a year. In their terms, God was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately, and the Devil, had he turned up with a card and a present, would have been treated with the cloying indulgence reserved for friends’ younger siblings.

Luckily that evening they were seeing a different and more recent group, some of whom were certified human beings. Richard stood at the bar affably enough, slowly downing a long series of Kronenbourgs while Chris alternately went to talk to people or brought them to talk to him. One of the latter, a doctor whom Richard believed to be called Kate, peered hard at him as soon as she hove into view.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, bluntly.

Richard was about to tell her that what he was holding was called a cigarette, that it consisted of the dried and rolled leaves of the tobacco plant, and that he had every intention — regardless of any objections she or anyone else might have — of sticking it in his mouth and lighting it, when he realized she was looking at his left hand. Too late, he tried to slip it into his pocket, but she reached out and snatched it up.

‘Been in a fight, have you?’ she asked. Behind her Chris turned from the man she was talking to and looked over Kate’s shoulder at Richard’s hand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a bizarre moving accident.’

‘Hmm,’ Kate said, her mouth pursed into a small moue of consideration. ‘Looks like someone’s come at you with a knife, if you ask me.’

Chris looked up at Richard, eyes wide, and he groaned inwardly.

‘Well, things between Chris and I haven’t been so good lately. ’ he tried, and got a laugh from both of them. Kate wasn’t to be deflected, however.

‘I’m serious,’ she said, holding up her own hand to demonstrate. ‘Someone tries to kill you with a knife, what do you do? You hold your hands up. And what happens is often the blade will nick the defending hands a couple of times before the knife gets through. See it all the time in Casualty. Little cuts, just like those.’

Richard pretended to examine the cuts on his hand, and shrugged.

‘Maybe Kate could look at your ribs,’ Chris said.

‘I’m sure there’s nothing she’d like better,’ he said. ‘After a hard day at the coal face there’s probably nothing she’d like more than to look at another piece of coal.’

‘What’s wrong with your ribs?’ Kate asked, squinting at him closely.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just banged them.’

‘Does this hurt?’ she asked, and suddenly cuffed him around the back of the head.

‘No,’ he said, laughing.

‘Then you’re probably all right,’ she winked, and disappeared to get a drink. Chris frowned for a moment, caught between irritation at not having got to the bottom of his rib problem and happiness at seeing him get on with one of her friends. Just then a fresh influx of people arrived at the door and Richard was saved from having to watch her choose which emotion to go with.

Mid-evening he went to the gents and shut himself into one of the cubicles. He changed the dressings on his penis and chest, and noted that some of the cuts on his stomach were now slick with blood. He didn’t have enough micropore to dress them, and realized he would just have to hope that they stayed manageable until he got home. The cuts on his hands didn’t seem to be getting any deeper.

Obviously they were just nicks. Almost, as Kate had said, as if someone had come at him with a knife.

They got home well after midnight. Chris was more drunk than Richard, but he didn’t mind. She was the only woman he’d ever met who got even cuter when she was plastered, instead of maudlin or argumentative.

Chris staggered straight into the bathroom, to do whatever the hell it was she spent hours in there doing. Richard made his way into the study to check the answerphone, banging into walls whose positions he still hadn’t really internalized.

One message.

Sitting heavily down on his chair, Richard pressed the play button. Without noticing he was doing it, he reached forward and turned down the volume so only he would hear what was on the tape. A habit born of the first weeks of his relationship with Chris, when Susan was still calling fairly regularly. Her messages, though generally short and uncontroversial, were not things he wanted Chris to hear. Again, a programme of protection, now no longer needed. Feeling self-righteous, and burping gently, Richard turned the volume back up.

He almost jumped out of his skin when he realized the message actually was from Susan, and quickly turned the volume back down. She said hello, in the diffident way she had, and went on to observe that they hadn’t seen each other that year yet. There was no reproach, simply a statement of fact. She asked him to call her soon, to arrange a drink.

The message had just finished when Chris caroomed out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste and moisturizer.

“ny messages?’

‘Just a wrong number,’ he said.

She shook her head slightly, apparently to clear it rather than in negation. ‘Coming to bed then?’ she asked, slyly. Waggling her eyebrows, she performed a slow grind with her pelvis, managing both not to fall over and not to look silly, which was a hell of a trick. Richard made his ‘Sex life in ancient Rome’ face, inspired by a book he’d read as a child.

‘Too right,’ he said. ‘Be there in a minute.’

But he stayed in the study for a quarter of an hour, long enough to ensure that Chris would have passed out. Wearing pyjamas for the first time in ten years, he slipped quietly in beside her and waited for the morning.

The bedroom seemed very small as he lay there, and whereas in Belsize Park the moonlight had sliced in, casting attractive shadows on the wall, in Kingsley Road the only visitors in the night were the curdled orange of a streetlight outside and the sound of a siren in the distance.

As soon as Chris had dragged herself groaning out of the house, Richard got up and went through to the bathroom. He knew before he took his night clothes off what he was going to find. He could feel parts of the pyjama top sticking to areas on his chest and stomach, and his crotch felt warm and wet.

The marks on his stomach now looked like proper cuts, and the gash on his chest had opened still further. His penis was covered in dark blood, and the gashes around it were nasty. He looked as if he had collided with a threshing machine. His ribs still hurt a great deal, though the pain seemed to be constricting, concentrating around a specific point rather than applying to the whole of his side.

He stood there for ten minutes, staring at himself in the mirror. So much damage. As he watched he saw a faint line slowly draw itself down three inches of his forearm; a thin raised scab. He knew that by the end of the day it would have reverted into a cut.

Mid morning he called Susan at her office number. As always he was surprised by how official she sounded when he spoke to her there. She had always been languid of voice, in complete contrast to her physical and emotional vivacity — but when you talked to her at work she sounded like a headmistress.

Her tone mellowed when she realized who it was. She tried to pin him down to a date for a drink, but he avoided the issue. They’d seen each other twice since she’d left him for John Ayer; once while he’d been living with Chris. Chris had been very relaxed about the meetings, but Richard hadn’t. On both occasions he and Susan had spent a good deal of time talking about Ayer; the first time focusing on why Susan had left Richard for him, the second on how unhappy she was about the fact that Ayer had in turn left her without even saying goodbye. Either she hadn’t realized how much the conversations would hurt Richard, or she hadn’t even thought about it. Most likely she had just taken comfort from talking to him in the way she always had.

‘You’re avoiding it, aren’t you,’ Susan said, eventually.

‘What?’

‘Naming a day. Why?’

‘I’m not,’ he protested, feebly. ‘Just, busy, you know. I don’t want to say a date and then have to cancel.’

‘I really want to see you,’ she said. ‘I miss you.’

Don’t say that, thought Richard miserably. Please don’t say that.

‘And there’s something else,’ she added. ‘It was a year today when. ’

‘When what?’ Richard asked, confused. They’d split up about eighteen months ago.

Susan took an audibly deep breath. ‘The last time I saw John,’ she said, and finally Richard understood.

That afternoon he took a walk to kill time, trolling up and down the surrounding streets, trying to find something to like. He discovered another corner store nearby, but it didn’t stock Parma ham either. Little dusty bags of fuses hung behind the counter, and the plastic strips of the cold cabinet were completely opaque. A little further afield he found a local video store, but he’d seen every thriller they had, most of them more than once. The storekeeper seemed to stare at him as he left, as if wondering what he was doing there.

After a while he simply walked, not looking for anything. Slab-faced fat women clumped by, screaming at children already getting into method for their five minutes of fame on CrimeWatch UK. Pipe-cleaner men stalked the streets in brown trousers and zip-up jackets, heads fizzing with racing results. The pavements seemed unnaturally grey, as if waiting for a second coat of reality, and hard green leaves spiralled down to join brown ashes already fallen.

And yet as he started to head back towards Kingsley Road he noticed a small dog standing on a corner, different to the one he’d seen before. White with a black head and lolling tongue, the dog stood still and looked at him, big brown eyes rolling with good humour. It didn’t bark, but merely panted, ready to play some game he didn’t know.

Richard stared at the dog, suddenly sensing that some other life was possible here, that he was occluding something from himself. The dog skittered on the spot slightly, keeping his eyes on Richard, and then abruptly sat down. Ready to wait. Ready to still be there.

Richard looked at him a little longer and then set off for the Tube station. He used the public phone there to leave a message at Kingsley Road, telling Chris he’d gone out unexpectedly and might be back late.

At eleven he left the George and walked down Belsize Avenue. He didn’t know how important the precise time was, and he couldn’t actually remember it, but it felt right. Earlier in the evening he had walked past the old flat, establishing that the ‘For Let’ sign was still outside. Probably the landlord had jacked the rent up so high he couldn’t find any takers.

During the hours he had spent in the pub he had checked the cuts only twice. Then he had ignored them, his only concession being to roll the sleeve of his shirt down to hide what was now a deep gash on his forearm. When he looked at himself in the mirror of the gents his face seemed pale; whether from the lighting or blood loss he didn’t know. As he could now push his fingers deep enough into the slash on his chest to feel his sternum he suspected it was probably the latter. When he used the toilet he did so with his eyes closed. He didn’t want to know what it looked like down there: the sensation of his fingers on ragged and sliced flesh was more than enough. The pain in his side had continued to condense, and was now restricted to a rough circle four inches in diameter.

It was time to go.

He slowed as he approached the flat, trying to time it so that he drew outside when there was no one else in sight. As he waited he marvelled quietly at how different the sounds were to those in Kentish Town. There was no shouting, no roar of maniac traffic or young bloods looking for damage. All you could hear was distant laughter, the sound of people having dinner, braving the cold and sitting outside Café Pasta or the Pizza Express. This area was different, and it wasn’t his home any more. As he realized that, it was with relief. It was time to say goodbye.

When the street was empty he walked quietly along the side of the building to the wall. Only about six feet tall, it held a gate through to the garden. Both sets of keys had been yielded, but Richard knew from experience that he could climb over. More than once he or Susan had forgotten their keys on the way out to get drunk and he’d had to let them back in this way.

He jumped up, arms extended, and grabbed the top of the wall. His side tore at him, but he ignored it and scrabbled up. Without pausing he slid over the top and dropped silently on to the other side, leaving a few slithers of blood behind. The window to the kitchen was there in the wall, dark and cold. Chris had left a dishcloth neatly folded over the tap in the sink. Other than that the room looked as if it had been moulded in an alien’s mind. Richard turned away and walked out into the garden.

He limped towards the centre, trying to recall how it had gone. In some ways he could remember everything; in others it was as if it had never happened to him, was just a secondhand tale told by someone else. A phone call to an office number he’d copied from Susan’s filofax before she left. An agreement to meet for a drink, on a night Richard knew she’d be out of town. Two men, meeting to sort things out in a gentlemanly fashion.

The stalks of Susan’s abandoned plants nodded suddenly in a faint breeze, and an eddy of leaves chased each other slowly around the walls. Richard glanced towards the living-room window. Inside it was empty, a couple of pieces of furniture stark against walls painted with dark triangular shadows. It was too dark to see, and he was too far away, but he knew the dust was gone. Even that little part had been sucked up and buried away.

He felt a strange sensation on his forearm, and looked down in time to see the gash there disappearing, from bottom to top, from finish to start. It went quickly, as quickly as it had been made. He turned to look at the verdant patch of grass, expecting to see it move, but it was still. Then he felt a warm sensation in his crotch, and realized it too would soon be whole. He had hacked at him there long after he knew Ayer was dead; hacked symbolically and pointlessly until the penis which had rootled and snuffled into Susan had been reduced to a scrap of offal.

The leaves moved again, faster, and the garden grew darker as if some huge cloud had moved into position overhead. It was now difficult to see as far as the end wall of the garden, and when he heard the distant sounds from there Richard realized the ground was not going to open up. No, first the wound in his chest, the fatal wound, would disappear. Then the cuts on his stomach, and the nicks on his hands from where Ayer had resisted, trying to be angry but so scared he had pissed his designer jeans. Finally the pain in his side would go; the first pain, the pain caused by Richard’s initial vicious kick after he had pushed his drunken rival over. A spasm of hate, flashes of violence, wipe pans of memory.

Then they would be back to that moment, or a moment before. Something would come towards him, out of the dry, rasping shadows, and they would talk again. How it would go Richard didn’t know, but he knew he could win, that he could walk away back to Chris and never come back here again.

It was time. Time to go.

Time to play a different game.