The Sacrificial Man (35 page)

Robin: But you want me to taste you?

Smith: Yes. That above all else. Raw human flesh must be quite tough so I’ll have to have a good knife.

Robin: I’ll see to that.

Smith: I was thinking about the Holy Communion – the part of me you will eat. It makes sense for me to cut loose flesh. I think there’s one obvious choice.

The day before Smith died I went to a knife shop. Of course it wasn’t just a knife shop. It sold many other things but that was why I was there so it was a knife shop to me. The knives were under the counter and a woman wearing a striped butcher’s apron guarded them. The shop sold gadgets to baste and wedge and grate. The shop assistant waited patiently for me to decide. But I was pretending. I picked up designer crockery, touched the Alessi lemon zester, but what I really wanted was locked beneath glass, glinting like stars. “Can I help you?” she finally asked.

I tried to arrange my face into innocence, to keep my voice neutral. “I’d like to buy a carving knife please. A good one.”

She turned and unlocked the cabinet, reached in, held one out to me. “This is a good quality all-purpose knife. What’ll you be using it for?”

A difficult question. I thought of what to say, the closest approximation of the truth. It was simple. I needed a knife to cut flesh. I need a knife to kill. “For meat. Cutting chops.” I didn’t even know if that was right. I had never bought meat. Did people cut chops, or did the butcher do it for them? Did I need a cleaver?

She returned the knife she was holding into its wooden sheath. “This is the best one,” she said, showing me a larger knife, a triangle of steel with a rosewood handle. “It’s a Sabatier boning knife. Top quality.”

I took it, measuring the weight as if expert in such purchases. Someone approached the counter, another woman, and I stood aside so she could purchase her Krupps espresso machine. I could wait. I was happy. I’d found what I sought and it felt natural in my grip, a perfect fit.

The knife was expensive. It cost a week’s pay, but was worth it. The label boasted its credentials: sixty-three layers of hammered and folded steel, a hard yet flexible blade. Oh – and it was beautiful.

Do you want to put me in a box, just like the professionals? To call me mad or a freak?

I’m not mad. I’m like you, and, like you, I seek love. I’m someone who wants to be loved, who longs for devotion. But I don’t trust it. The only love I’ve ever known, died. That is why. Unsatisfactory. Distorted. My apology. But I’m a flawed human being. Just like you.

An act is always more than what happens. Everything carries more weight as a totality, than as a sum of separate parts. And the separate parts are these:

I had a knife, shiny and new and of the highest quality. It was hidden in my bedside cabinet, a final gift.

We had a plan. Smith would take the second vial of GHB and as he drifted into unconsciousness he would cut himself. While we waited for his death, for the heart attack that would come from the overdose, I would eat his flesh.

Cate slides the memory stick into the computer and waits for Smith’s diary to load onto the screen. In less than two hours she’ll have her final meeting with Alice. By then she’ll have decided what sentence to recommend. The report is already written, except for the final paragraph: the proposed sentence. She is thinking about a lengthy community order, maybe for two years, but most probably for three. She’s spoken to Dr Gregg, who will continue to work with Alice as an outpatient and he’s agreed that she could be managed in the community as long as she’s monitored. What would be the point of a prison sentence? Alice wouldn’t get any kind of therapy or intervention, and her problems don’t fit the standard ‘one size fits all’ treatments currently in vogue. At least working with her on an individual basis would give Cate the opportunity to look at Alice’s distorted attitude to relationships. She could refer Alice to a grief counsellor; the loss of her mother had affected Alice’s attitude to love and death and she had never worked through the trauma of finding her mother dead when she was just four-years-old.

Cate feels sorry for Alice. After reading most of David Jenkins’ diary it’s clear that he had wanted to die, and if Alice hadn’t volunteered he would of found somebody else to assist him. Added to this is the horrible fact of Jenkins’ illness and his desire to infect her with CJD. Who wouldn’t feel sorry for Alice, knowing that? Alice must be told that she was at risk of having the disease. There was no doubt in Cate’s mind that Alice, not Jenkins, was the real victim.

So, a community order was her preferred sentence. In court tomorrow she would argue strongly against prison. Backed up with a persuasive account of how Alice would be totally unable to cope with being locked up, Cate was sure she could convince the judge to be lenient. After all, assisting a suicide wasn’t the same as murder. David Jenkins had wanted to die.

She clicked the icon titled Robin & Smith and prepared to read the last part of his testimony:

It’s Friday night. Friday 15th June. My final night. It was strange leaving the bungalow, surreal, saying goodbye to the bits and pieces that make up my life’s journey. Though my travels only amount to the daily commute to the office, and a few holidays in the Lake District. I’ve surrounded myself with fossilised rocks, pictures of mountains I’ve seen but not climbed, menus from the local Chinese takeaway. This is the stuff of my life and, in the end, it’s pretty pathetic. It’ll be emptied into black plastic bags, maybe a few things will be taken to sell or give away, but most will end up in a landfill site. Forgotten. And that could’ve been my fate. Instead, I’ll die a memorable death. And, through Robin, part of me will live on, until her death. (Jesus said, I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.)

I packed a small suitcase, like I was going on a weekend away, a mini-break to relieve the stress, to break the monotony. I packed carefully. A clean shirt. Worn but comfortable beige chinos. New underwear. A bag for a journey with no return. The thought makes me sentimental, and I took a photo from the shelf, dusty and ignored for months. In it my parents are young and smiling. It’s not how I remember them but I like it. It shows me how they were, how life was, before the car crash. The anniversary of my mother’s death is tomorrow.

I was just eight-years-old. Remembering that day, I think of the stamp book I’d been looking at, the new stamps carefully inserted behind paper sheets with tweezers. I was busy with this when my grandma took the call. It had been my dad calling; his injuries were only minor. I still had the tweezers in my hand when I heard her slide to the floor, sobbing as she held the receiver tight to her ear, listening for better news about her daughter that would never come. I threw my stamp collection away that night, but Dad picked it out of the trash, kept it with the photo albums in the cupboard that housed the electricity meter.

In the empty bungalow I went to the meter cupboard, opening it to the scurry of a spider and an outbreath of dust. It was there, beneath the yellow pages, on top of an old holiday brochure: my stamp book. I took it out. It was smaller than I remembered, a cardboard collection with my scrawled name inside the dog-eared front cover in careful round letters, but the stamps were immaculate. I put the book into the case, along with my laptop and the USB stick, safe in an envelope.

At London Liverpool Street I bought a single ticket, one way, to Colchester. I walked past a Big Issue seller, a mangy greyhound lying at his feet, and gave him a tenner. He tried to offer me the magazine but I didn’t take it. What good would it do me to read about the world? Instead, I stood and watched the board change, scanning for the town, until finally the name revealed itself. Platform twelve, the four o’clock service to Colchester.

The train was full, and I was forced to stand in the part where two carriages met and motion was jerky. I was next to the communal toilet, and the door kept opening in a belch of stale fags and piss. Next to me stood a weary mother with shopping bags and a young girl, who refused to stand. No doubt sick of being dragged around shops for hours, the girl silently rebelled by wiping her hand on the unclean floor, making shapes in the dust. Every time a traveller came to use the toilet the mother had to apologise and make a show of asking her daughter to get up.

I guessed the girl was about eight, and thought of myself at that age. I’d loved trains. I’d collected stamps from places I’d never been and would never go, though I didn’t know that then. I thought the world was mine for the taking. How innocent I was. I didn’t even know I was alive, never doubted that my eyes would open each day, that my lungs would take in air. I’d give anything for one hour, just sixty minutes, of that certainty now.

The girl had blonde hair, which was bright when the sun caught it, and green eyes like a kitten. This must have been what Robin looked like as a child; she was innocent once. Was innocent still, ignorant of the disease that’s killing me. Five months ago I’d sat before a computer screen and set a plan in motion. All those ideas we’d tussled with on the screen, the words we played with which seemed more real than being on the train in a cramped carriage, as if I was already a ghost. The little girl, sensing me staring, looked up.

I felt dizzy and longed to sit on the dirty floor next to her, to trail my fingers in the dust. Instead I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes. I lurched as the train hurled around a corner and collided with the mother, stepping back on one of her shopping bags. “Sorry,” I said, but she looked at me disapprovingly, maybe thinking I was drunk. I wasn’t drunk. I was sick. Morbidly unwell.

The dizziness intensified and I sat clumsily on the floor, not caring that my clothes would get dirty. The girl looked at me, curious, and her mother’s hand protectively touched her blonde head. No-one trusts strangers anymore especially if they talk to children. But I had nothing to lose.

“Hello,” I said, and she looked back at the floor, well taught in ignoring men she didn’t know. She wasn’t shy – her eyes kept wandering towards me, and she was bored. I reached forward unsteadily, unzipped my case. I could feel her mother watching me, sense her tension as if I was about to retrieve a bomb. But I’m no hijacker. I just wanted to make a connection. I took out the stamp book and opened it on my lap, seeing that the girl was looking too.

“Do you know what these are?”

She shrugged, the casual indifference of I’m-not-stupid. “Stamps.”

“That’s right. From all over the world. Places you wouldn’t even dream of. See this,” I pointed to a pink stamp depicting an alpaca, “that’s from Peru. Do you know where that is?”

The girl shook her head.

“South America. A long way away.”

“I’ve been to America,” she offered. “We went to Florida. I swam with dolphins.”

The girls face lit up, and I wondered if Robin had ever swum with dolphins. If she’d ever travelled to America. “I’d like to go to South America,” I told the girl.

“Then why don’t you?” she asked.

A simple enough question, but I couldn’t answer. When the train stopped at Chelmsford her mother started to collect her bags. I handed the stamp book to the girl. “Here,” I said, “it’s yours.” She took it, no doubt to be told off by her mother after they got off. She’ll look at it, and dream of other places that maybe someday she’ll visit, and then may even remember me.

After Chelmsford I was alone in the corridor, and the toilet door swung against my foot, but I didn’t stand. I occupied myself by picturing Robin as a little girl, and waited for the train to stop again at the terminus. The end of my journey.

Robin was waiting. It was a sunny June evening and she’d dressed up for me in a cream dress and strappy sandals. I worried that the grime from my clothes would mark her, but she ran over, not caring about my dirty clothes, and threw her arms around me. I should’ve felt supported, less likely to fall, but instead I had vertigo like I was standing at a great height and looking over the edge. If she noticed me shaking she didn’t say.

We drove back to the house and she was unusually chatty, talking about the sun, and how everything looked beautiful. We stopped outside an off-licence and I watched her disappear into the shop, saw a man walking by give her the once-over. She did look beautiful, so why didn’t I feel happy? After all, she was my girlfriend and soon she would be my lover. Everything was as it should be. As we’d planned.