Friction (28 page)

‘Colin?' he says.

There is a lengthy silence as Justin listens carefully to the voice on the end of the line, tapping his finger against the thick window pane to drown the sounds of Steve's crying. It's almost a minute before Justin speaks, by which time he is pacing the room angrily and occasionally slapping the window with the flattened palm of his hand. Steve continues to moan, both his hands pull the Stetson hard over his face in an enormous and desperate attempt to mute his distress.

More seconds pass until Justin slaps the window so hard he's convinced it's going to shatter and shower innocent people in broken glass. Steve screams and the window holds firm. Turning towards the door Justin holds his phone out in front of his face like a microphone. He's shouting, his face stretched and red.

‘Is Rebecca pregnant or not, Colin? What the fuck have you done to her?'

COLIN KICKS REBECCA
several times across her body. He bends down, lifting her by the neck, pointing her disastrous face at his own. Blood runs from her chestnut hairline. Blood runs from her mouth.

‘It's love, is it?' he says, crooked fingers digging into her. Rebecca. His last chance. Broken on the bathroom floor.

He allows her head to fall and join her body on the red tiles. He moves to the sink and watches his reflection in the mirror. He sniffs. Is this it? He wonders whether he should wipe his scarlet hand across his reflected image. But he doesn't; what would be the point? In his inside pocket his phone begins to sing, the word ‘Justin' flashing in the centre of the screen.

‘Hello,' says Colin, somehow politely, one eye fixed on its reflection. Justin says his name and Colin walks calmly from the room.

‘She hasn't been aborting them,' he says, on the landing
now, banging on the banister in an attempt to stay calm. ‘She's been lying to us. She killed my first, but since then, nothing. She's been carrying your kid for six months. She's been lying to me and lying to you. Making us believe that she killed them at the clinic.'

Colin begins to turn in circles, kicking the same place on the wall with each rotation. ‘So it's over,' he says. ‘I've dealt with it and dealt with her. She should have known.' The wallpaper splits and plaster trickles to the floor. ‘It has to be so boring now. Do you see, Justin? I've dealt with the kid. But all along it's been lies. Do you understand? It has to be so boring from now on. Not a party, only a funeral!'

Colin pulls his foot from the wall, dropping his phone as he does so. Back in the bathroom. More kicks. Rebecca's bloated stomach. Tears in both their eyes. Snakes alive in Colin's veins, kicking her again and again, the treacherous dog, dressed in blood, kicks between her legs. Broken hearted.

‘Do you see what you've done?' he shouts, fists at his eyes. He lets out a piercing high-pitched scream. ‘Do you see what you've done?'

Rebecca watches as Colin leaves the bathroom once again. Her senses are shadows of their former selves. Colin exits in a sequence of jumping images and scratched sounds. Rebecca is hurt. She has been vandalised by Colin's heavy feet and fast legs. Her body feels like scattered stones. It's incomprehensible to her. The pain is a powerful throb, like a heart beating inside her skull. Her blood surrounds her. It's as if all agony is, is a pulse, a countdown, a mindset where all memory is rendered absurd. She can make out little of her surroundings. There is bleach where she lies. There is rat poison, too. Rebecca closes her eyes.

She has seen this situation before. In her mind. She has
seen herself beaten in Colin's home. She always knew it might occur. For months she has concealed Justin's child from both him and Colin. She has continued to visit them both in ever more loose-fitting attire. Both boys have been surprised at their ability to conceive with Rebecca. Always at the first attempt. Both have declared their joy at creating a wordless, lightless being, unscathed by the shining boredoms of the outside world. Both have thanked her like rewarded infants as she left for the clinic to terminate the foetus and complete their fetish. But there was only ever one abortion.

Seven months ago Rebecca knocked on Colin's door. It was as his arm wrapped round her and pushed her up the stairs that her mind began to change. She had lost interest in Dostoevsky. She had quit her job and abandoned her degree. She was enjoying the sensation of her life being dismantled, like a completed jigsaw puzzle being broken up into larger sections, then being frantically reduced to its hundreds and hundreds of different pieces. For Justin's sake she went to Colin. She hoped that it was love all along.

Sex proved a protracted arrangement of mysterious jolts; Colin's body whacking and aching around her. He came with eyes melted shut and Rebecca had to resist the temptation to laugh. She was certainly far from tears, even given the stench of Colin's stale blue room. Experimenting with Justin had long since blunted her sexual fears.

A week later she pissed on a pregnancy test. She pissed on it in the very room in which currently she bleeds. She watched as Colin wept as it turned a chemical blue. Positive. Colin stroked her flat belly with a clenched fist. ‘A life that will never see light. Innocent,' he whispered, causing Rebecca to shake her head and just watch as his tears fell.

Afterwards, at the clinic, it was the sound of wails that woke Rebecca. It was minutes before she recognised them as her own. The anaesthetic wore thin and a nurse smiled above her. Women lay in silence on each adjacent bed. Some stared at magazines; crisp, old and hardly held by their hands. One woman held a lipstick and seemed to contemplate applying a coat. But what was the point? Rebecca watched as the scarlet stick was wound down and discarded. It was then that she decided: never again. Nature was talking. Not dead after all. Rebecca pictured her womb, disgruntled and suddenly emptied, its contents sucked out and flushed to God knows where. Never again.

Things were already moving beyond the control of her and Justin. Antiporn protested at the clinic's gates. Rebecca had to barge through placards and loud screams. Women with faces full of shadows grabbed her clothing. Women with colourless hair and old coats. Appalled at the concept of abortions carried out just for fun. Some placards even mentioned newsex.biz. Rebecca's deceit began that day.

A month later she and Justin conceived. Justin had been identified as the boy behind the website. There were reporters outside the house. As the test turned blue, Justin talked of unseen life, of happiness, of answers, finally. After all the prostitutes, domination, dogging, Gandhi-shagging, celebrities, the various probes and gangbangs. Happiness, finally. He looked out of the window, prompting an explosion of bright camera flashes from the pavement below. Rebecca left, to abort it, she said. But instead she walked home and wept.

On the bathroom floor, Rebecca tries to turn on to her side. The rat poison is paddling now, encircled by her blood. She
thinks of Justin. Was it love all along? He's hounded constantly nowadays, by the media and by Frank. She sees him too rarely. She needs to see him. She needs him now because she is bleeding to death. Their child presumably dead inside her.

It was this afternoon that Colin discovered her secret. Rebecca had tried to remain clothed as he made his usual manic advances. The strange hoots and groans that always precede their sex. For Justin, all this for Justin? I'm an idiot, Rebecca thought. I'm a fucking idiot. She was surprised when Colin demanded that she took off all her clothes. ‘Get rid of them,' he shouted, tugging at her blouse. To Rebecca it seemed antique to shrug her garments off. But it seems a fondness for nudity survives in this era of new sex. Colin began tearing at her clothing, pulling at it until the seams began to break. He couldn't be stopped. It wasn't long before he ripped off her blouse to reveal her round stomach. Their eyes met. Both hearts sank.

‘It's Justin's,' Rebecca said immediately, gathering up her limbs and making naked for the door. ‘I love him,' she added, turning back to Colin as she left. ‘I really love him.'

That's when Colin turned blue. When the rats retreated. When the air suddenly dried. The screwed-up structures began to unfold; detritus came to life. Pizza boxes flexing into something like their original form. Beer cans unscrunching with loud scraping sounds. Colin's shoulders hunched as if wings were sprouting from his back in an agonising but ecstatic metamorphosis. His lips curled and his mouth made a distant sound, as if his voice was coming from a gnarled recess at the bottom of his diaphragm, echoing up his throat, over his tongue and barely tapping at the sound barrier.

‘But I was becoming happy,' he said.

‘It's getting out of hand.' Rebecca's voice was an attempt at calm. It had an American inflection, as if by imitating a mainstream culture the situation could be diffused.

‘We've failed,' said Colin, softly. ‘And it's time to get extremely boring.'

At this point, he ran to Rebecca and punched her several times hard in the face. He knocked out a tooth, the blood on his knuckles confused itself with the blood that poured instantly from her soft face. She couldn't struggle, she just fumbled amid the shock of painless punches. She hit the floor; the jigsaw was being dismantled, every piece separated and scattered.

In the course of the beating she was dragged here, to the bathroom, underneath the sink where she now lies. It is only now, having been beaten to the creosoted touchline of consciousness, that Rebecca realises that lately she's been living in a trance. Her ear rests on the wet red of the bathroom floor. Below, Colin can be heard. How can he be stopped?

Down in the kitchen, Colin's hands are full of bullshit. Full of many different panini: chorizo, mozzarella, pesto and Parma ham. He throws them into the microwave and sets the time. He'd bought them for the cruel-brained slut factory bleeding to death upstairs. Bought them because, until now, he cared for her. He wanted her to eat what she liked when she came to stay. He was willing to cede ground to her world of lifestyle and fucking crap.

Ping! The panini are done. He takes them out and replaces them with a series of coffees he'd bought for her. The bitch, he thinks, remembering the stomach, setting the time. The lie. How could she?

It killed Colin to buy these items. The coffees and the food. To shop around in the mud and the free and easy aisles for the dog shit that devours him. He holds a jar of sundried tomatoes up to the light. He watches them bob about in their oil, seasoned and packaged. Oh, the bastard betrayal and the word love.

He returns to the bathroom holding the food and the drink. The piping hot, Italian-inspired bollocks: cappuccinos, lattes, brain-rot, sundried tomatoes. Rebecca hasn't moved, maybe squirmed a little, breathing like a breathing machine, dying because he's fucked it up at last.

‘It's a funeral,' he shouts. ‘Because the world will never change.' His lips are nibbling at each other, squabbling. He places the food and drink beside the bath, arranging them neatly like a buffet. Turning to look in the mirror he's convinced that he's invisible, that his reflection is just staring out at an empty room.

‘It's a funeral,' he says again, staring down at Rebecca before turning and leaving once again.

Rebecca hears the key turn in the bathroom lock. Moments later she hears the front door slam below. It's a blessing. He's gone. She turns and looks towards the bottles under the sink. Since she smelt the scent of pesto and saw Colin arranging the food beside the bath, her mind has been on the rat poison. She reaches for it.

Her breathing reminds her of a kettle in the middle phase of its boiling process. But it's her blood that boils. Thick angry liquid drips from her face in red-hot drops. I should never have returned here, she reminds herself. I'm an idiot. She attempts to climb on to her hands and knees but is forced to give up. Body and mind are in moods with each
other, back to back with folded arms, making her desire to poison the panini hard to realise.

Having recalled a series of popular films in which people perform complex physical tasks while teetering within inches of their lives, Rebecca falls and squirms in the direction of the bath. With one hand she holds her bloated abdomen, with the other she pushes the rat poison across the floor. She recalls Colin's face as he'd arranged the food. His white light eyes. His entire face grinning like teeth in a vice.

The lid of the rat poison is a nightmare, not designed in the interests of girls with crooked, broken fingers and bloody, slippery hands. Eventually the lid's off and, breathing like a building site, she's able to lift the tops off the panini and sprinkle the turquoise pellets among the lukewarm ingredients. Rebecca looks at the tomatoes and the coffees and she wonders what the fuck? And where is Justin? She gasps. Where is Dostoevsky and where is my lovely life?

Using a towel to erase the skids of cranberry blood left by her journey, Rebecca works her way back to the sink, returning the rat poison to its home by the bleach.

Quite naturally, she's dying. Her baby, too. She pats her stomach with her hand, like beating wet sand with a toy spade. Her knickers are horrifyingly red and her legs are streaked with blood, like dire, dated, patterned leggings. She settles under the sink using the bloody towel as a pillow. She believes that Justin will save her. It's been love all along. He'll track me down, she thinks. Somehow he will.

Her body looks like Mars. The mountain of her stomach is coated in a layer of dried brown blood. Beyond it lies a lake of deep red, where the Martians holiday, perhaps,
where they sunbathe. But what of such description? Time is dripping like a tap into an empty sink. Din. Din. Din. Where has Colin gone?

I know where Colin's gone. You can always rely on me. I'm.

Colin strides out into Withington. The weather looks more like a weather forecast; simple representation of clouds, suns, showers of rain. The culture of cool days has spread. Withington is a selection of warm colours; outlets selling a busy day, a chilled convo, a snatch of tradition, preoccupation, a bite on the run. Colin struggles to believe anyone has jobs any more. But if you stare through the colours and the freshly baked confectionery, you will notice faint signs of human industry, its yellow scaffolded grin.