Playing for the Ashes (49 page)

“Have you homes lined up already? Are we going to deliver them this morning, like the milk? Oh, but let’s keep one. She’ll be a souvenir. I’ll call her Break-in.”

He winced. He looked like something was pinching him behind his eyes.

I said, “Did you get hurt? Did you cut yourself? Did you hurt your hands? Shall I drive? I’ll drive. Chris, pull over. Let me drive.”

He stepped harder on the accelerator. I watched the needle on the speedometer creep higher. The kittens cried.

I twisted in my seat and pulled one of the carriers towards me, saying, “Okay, you. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Chris said, “Livie.”

“Who are you? What’s your name? Are you glad to be out of that nasty old place?”

Chris said, “Livie.”

But I already had the top open and I was scooping the little ball of fur into my hand. I could see the kitten was a tabby, grey-brown and white with overlarge ears and eyes. I said, “Oh, you’re a sweet one,” and rested the kitten on my lap. He mewled. His little claws caught at my leggings. He began to crawl towards my knees.

Chris said, “Put him back,” just at the moment that I noticed the kitten’s back legs. They dangled, useless and twisted, behind him. His tail hung limp. A long thin incision ran along his spine, held together by blood-crusted metal sutures. Towards his shoulders the incision oozed pus that matted against the fur.

I felt myself recoil. “Shit!” I said.

Chris said, “Put him back in the carrier.”

“I…What’s he…What’s been done…?”

“They’ve broken his spinal cord. Put him back.”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I pressed my head against the back of the seat.

“Take him off me,” I said. “Chris. Please.”

“What did you think? What in hell did you think?”

I squeezed my eyes closed. I felt the tiny claws against my skin. I saw the kitten against the back of my eyelids. They burned. My face burned. The kitten mewled. I felt his small head brush my hand.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said.

Chris swerved into a layby. He got out, slammed the door, came round to my side. He yanked my door open. I heard him curse.

He scooped the kitten off me and pulled me out of the van. He said, “What’d you think this was? A game? What’d you think this was, for God’s sake?”

His voice was high and tight. The sound of it rather than what he said made me open my eyes. He looked like I felt: punched in the gullet. He cradled the kitten against his chest.

“Come here,” he said. He walked to the

rear of the van. “I said come here.” “Don’t make me—” “Goddamn it. Come here, Livie. Now.” He flung the rear door open. He began to

tear at the carriers’ tops. “Look,” he said.

“Livie. Come here. I’m telling you to look.” “I don’t need to see.” “We’ve got broken spinal cords.” “Don’t.” “We’ve got open brains.” “No.” “We’ve got skull-mounted plugs and—” “Chris!” “—electrodes sutured into muscles.” “Please.” “No. Look.
Look
.” And then his voice

broke. And he leaned his forehead against the van. And he started to cry.

I watched. I couldn’t move to him. I heard his weeping and the cries of the animals blend together. I could think of nothing but being at least a hundred miles away from this narrow layby in the darkness with a cool breeze blowing from the distant channel. His shoulders quaked. I took a step towards him. I knew in that instant that there was no redemption if I did not look. At the half-shaven and thoroughly broken bodies, the shrivelled limbs, the swelling and the sutures, the clots of dried blood.

I went hot then cold. I thought about my words. I considered all the things I didn’t know. I turned away. I said, “Here, Chris. Give him to me.” I loosened Chris’s
fin
gers, took the kitten, and held him cradled in my hands. I put him back in his carrier. I closed the tops of the others. I shut the van door and grasped Chris’s arm. “Here,” I said and led him to the passenger’s seat.

When we were both inside, I said, “Where’s Max waiting for us?” because I now knew what he’d kept to himself throughout planning the assault, throughout carrying it off. “Chris,” I asked again, “where’re we to meet Max?”

So we put them down, those kittens and cats, one by one. Max administered the injections. Chris and I held them. We held them against our chests so that the last thing each little animal felt was a human heart beating steadily against him.

When we were finished, Max gripped my shoulder. “Not the initiation you were expecting, was it?”

I shook my head numbly. I laid the
fin
al little body in the box that Max had ready for the purpose.

“Well done, girlie,” Max said.

Chris turned and went out into the early morning. It was just before dawn, the moment when the sky hasn’t decided between darkness and light, so both exist simultaneously. To the west the sky was shrouded, dove grey. To the east, it was feathered with rose-edged clouds.

Chris was standing next to the mini-van, his hand on its roof curled into a fist. He watched the dawn.

I said, “Why do people do what they do?”

He shook his head blindly. He got into the van. On the way back to Little Venice, I held his hand. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to make things right.

When we got back to the barge, Toast and Beans met us at the door. They whimpered and rustled round our legs.

“They want a run,” I said. “Shall I take them?”

Chris nodded. He threw his rucksack into a chair and headed for his room. I heard his door close.

I took the dogs out and we loped and gambolled along the canal. They chased a ball, tussling with each other and growling, racing to drop the ball at my feet then dashing ahead with a happy yelp to fetch it again. When they’d had enough and the morning was beginning to stir with school children and commuters on their way to work, we wandered back to the barge. It was dark inside, so I opened the shutters in the workroom. I fed and watered the dogs. I crept quietly along the passageway and paused outside the door to Chris’s room. I tapped against it. He didn’t answer. I tried the knob and went in.

He was lying on the bed. He’d taken off his jacket and his shoes, but he still wore the rest of his clothes: black jeans, black pullover, black socks with a hole at the heel of the right one. He wasn’t asleep. Rather he was gazing, unblinking, at a photograph that stood among the books on his bookshelf. I’d seen it before. Chris and his brother at five and eight years old. They were kneeling in the muck and grinning happily, their arms slung over the neck of a baby donkey. Chris was dressed as Sir Gala-had. His brother was dressed like Robin Hood.

I tipped my knee against the edge of the bed. I put my hand on his leg.

He said, “Odd.”

“What?”

“That. I was supposed to become a barrister as well. Like Jeffrey. Have I told you?”

“Only that he’s a barrister. Not the other.”

“Jeff’s got ulcers. I didn’t want them. I want to make change, I told him, and this isn’t the way to go about it. Change happens from working within the system, he said. I thought he was wrong. But I was.”

“You weren’t.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “You weren’t wrong,” I said. “Look how you’ve changed me.”

“People change themselves.”

“Not always. Not now.”

I lay next to him, my head sharing his pillow, my face close to his. His eyelids dropped. I touched my fingers to them. I traced his sandy lashes. I grazed the pockmarks that peppered his cheekbones.

“Chris,” I whispered.

Other than closing his eyes, he hadn’t moved. “Hmm?”

“Nothing.”

Have you ever wanted someone so much that you ache between the legs? That’s what it was like. My heart beat just like it always beat. My breathing didn’t alter. But I was throbbing and sore. I felt the need for him burn like a hot ring pressing into my body.

I knew what to do: where to place my hands, how to move, when to loosen his clothes and rid myself of my own. I knew how to arouse him. I knew exactly what he would like. I knew how best to make him forget.

OLIVIA

T
he ache climbed my body like a white-hot shaft. And I had the power to obliterate the pain. All I needed to do was go back to the past. Be a young swan floating on the Serpentine, be a cloud in the sky, be a doe in the forest, be a pony running wild in the wind of Dartmoor. Be anything that allowed me to perform without feeling. Make any one of the hundred moves I’d once indifferently made for money, and the ache would dissolve with Chris’s surrender.

I did nothing. I lay on his bed and I watched him sleep. By the time the pain climbed my body to arrive in my throat, I’d admitted the worst to myself about love.

I hated him at first. I hated what he had brought me to. I hated the woman he had proven to me that I could become.

I swore then that I’d eradicate emotion, and I began the process by taking on every bloke I could find. I had them in cars, in squats, in underground stations, in parks, in pub toilets, and on the barge. I made them bark like dogs. I made them sweat and weep. I made them beg. I watched them crawl. I heard them gasp and howl. Chris never reacted. He never said a word, until I began to go to work on the blokes who were part of our assault unit.

They were such easy pickings. Sensitive to begin with, they felt the excitement of a successful assault as much as I did. They received the suggestion of a post-assault celebration like the innocents they were. They said initially, “But we’re not supposed to…” and “Actually, it’s my understanding that outside the structure of the organisation’s regular activities, we aren’t allowed…” and “Gosh, we can’t, Livie. We gave our word. About getting involved.” To which I said, “Pooh. Who’s going to know? I’m not going to tell anyone. Are you?” To which they replied, with a heavy blush climbing their peach-skin cheeks, “I wouldn’t tell. Of course not. I’m not that sort.” To which I said in all wide-eyed innocence, “What sort? I’m only talking about having a drink together.” To which they would stammer, “Of course. I didn’t mean…I wouldn’t presume to think…”

I took them to the barge, these blokes. They said, “Livie, we can’t. At least not here. If Chris finds out, we’re finished.” I said, “You let me worry about Christopher,” and I closed the door behind us. “Or don’t you want to?” I said. I locked my fingers round the buckles of their belts and pulled them forward. I lifted my mouth to theirs. “Or don’t you want to?” I asked and insinuated my fingers into their jeans. “Well?” I said against their mouths as I hooked one arm round their waists. “Do you or don’t you? Better make up your mind.”

What mind they had left at that point was targeted on a single thought, which wasn’t much of a thought in the first place. We fell onto my bed and kicked off our clothes. I liked it best if they were vocal because things got properly noisy then, and as noisy as possible was how I wanted it.

I was doing two of them one early morning after an assault when Chris intervened. White-faced, he walked into my room. He grabbed one bloke by the hair and the other by the arm. He said, “You’re gone. Finished,” and he shoved them down the passageway towards the galley. One of them said, “Hey! Aren’t you being rather a hypocrite, Faraday?” The other yowled. “Out. Take your gear. Get out,” Chris said. When the barge door slammed on them and the bolts flew home, Chris returned to me.

I lounged on my bed and lit a cigarette, indifference personified. “Spoilsport,” I pouted. I was naked, and I made no move for either blanket or robe.

His fingers curled tightly into his palms. He didn’t appear to breathe. “Put your clothes on.
Now
.”

“Why? Are you throwing me out as well?”

“I’ve no intention of being so bloody easy on you.”

I sighed. “What’re you in such a twist about? We were just having fun.”

“No,” he said. “You were just having at me.”

I rolled my eyes and dragged on my cigarette.

“If you destroy the whole unit, will that satisfy you? Will that be enough amends on my part?”

“Amends for what?”

“For not wanting to shag you. Because I don’t. I haven’t ever, and I don’t propose to start no matter how many dimwits in London stuff you. Why can’t you accept that? Why can’t you just let us be as we are? And for Christ’s sake put on some clothes.”

“If you don’t want me and you haven’t ever and you don’t intend to start wanting me now, what’s it to you if I’m dressed or not? Are you getting heated up?”

He went to the clothes cupboard and pulled out my robe. He threw it at me. “I’m getting heated, yes, but not the way you want.”

“I’m not the one who wants,” I pointed out to him. “I’m the one who takes.”

“And that’s what you’re doing with all these blokes, is it? Taking what you want? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I see one I fancy. I have him. That’s it. What’s the problem with that? Does it bother you?”

“Does it bother
you
?”

“What?”

“To lie? To rationalise? To play a role? Come on, Livie. Start facing who you are. Start dealing with the truth.” He walked out of my room, calling, “Beans, Toast, let’s go.”