Shallow Cuts: Crime Flash Fiction Read online

  I’m thirty years old today. When I was a kid I always thought I’d be living in America by now. If we lived in America we could be sitting in a cabin or a lake house. A mountain hideaway in Michigan or a waterfront ranch in Oregon. Somewhere with wooden walls and wild views and beautiful isolation. No neighbours, no traffic noise, nothing but empty sky and the calling of birds. In my mind’s eye I see ravens; huge and sleek, black harbingers of doom.

  Is that really ravens, or am I maligning them unfairly? I don’t know. But if they’re not precursors of disaster in real life, they are in my head. And that’s where the important stuff happens, after all.

  But I don’t mind, really, that we stayed here. London, grey and neon, both frighteningly alive and as full of rotting corpses as any zombie film. We still have an affectionate relationship. Probably because we’re so alike.

  But if Den and I can’t be in the mountains, at least we have snow today. Snow provides the kind of isolation you normally can’t get in a city. Blank, buffering snow, masking and silencing the world underneath.

  ‘Have we got a shovel anywhere, Jan?’ Den asks. ‘In the shed, maybe? I’m sure I’ve seen one somewhere. I should go out and clear the drive.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Leave it as it is.’

  He shrugs. ‘All right. Do you want some breakfast?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, although I don’t. Den can’t cook, but that’s a good thing. I have nightmares, and sometimes only the smell of burning bacon can waft them away. The smell of the preparation of dead flesh. It feels like a ceremonial action, the start of a complex ritual that will bring about the end of the world. I think that I have been enacting this ritual for most of my life. I think the ritual is my life.

  You can eat nightmares, but most people don’t know that. Den doesn’t. He doesn’t know I eat his. They fill me up.

  He left his wife and kids for me, five years ago. He dreams about them a lot, dreams about witches and demons pulling them into bite-sized pieces. In the morning he blames it on too many late nights in front of the Horror Channel.

  He shouldn’t have left them. I don’t think he knows that either, though.

  He kept a photo of Baby Harriet in his wallet for a long time. Baby Harriet grew up to be a monstrous teenager, all bile and cheap piercings that she doesn’t know how to properly flaunt. I ate her picture, and I know her intimately.

  Her mother, Carly, is simply concrete now. No juice left. I’m sorry about that.

  No, I’m not.

  The snow is still falling, the air thick with glittering white. Would it choke me if I went outside and tried to breathe? Maybe. Maybe I’ll open the door and find out.

  In America, I would be able to breathe easier. Montana, Texas, Alaska; all those wide open spaces providing great lungfulls of air. In America, I wouldn’t be the way I am. I wouldn’t be the person I am. I would keep my accent because you always have to remember where you came from, but I could call myself Bobbie-Sue and say things like buck naked and gotten and son of a bitch.

  In South Carolina I would have humidity and heat rash and go looking for alligators. We’re all in a fishbowl, and sometimes they forget to feed us. The water gets murky and I bump my nose against the glass. It’s all just lip-synching anyhow.

  I have a headache. They usually follow the nightmares. The bacon doesn’t help with those much.

  Den works in insurance. Received wisdom says that’s boring, but I don’t think it is. Den doesn’t ever seem bored. That’s his superpower, I think. You don’t want to know what mine is.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ I say as Den comes back into the living room with two plates stacked high with bacon sandwiches. In New York, the sandwiches would have fifteen other exotic ingredients and be made with three slices of dark German rye bread. These just have ketchup.

  We always eat in the living room, on the sofa, in front of the TV. Even when it’s not on. We don’t actually watch a lot of TV. My mother used to say that you should always eat at a dining table, otherwise it showed a lack of class. That made me laugh. Still does. But credit where it’s due. She was the classiest prostitute I ever met. And I met a lot.

  Den puts the plates on the coffee table. I pat the cushion beside me and he sits down. He folds his hands in his lap and looks grave. Den is good at looking grave. I think it comes from all those insurance claims. All those litanies of disaster. Storm, flood, lightning, malicious damage, subterranean fire. I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds terrifying. Like the wrath of gods.

  He always listens to my secrets but I don’t think he always believes them. Does the failing lie with him, or me? Or with the universe? Perhaps there is insufficient verisimilitude in the truth.

  ‘I killed a man once’, I tell him. ‘I wanted to kill my father because that’s more mythological and myths are how we make sense of the world. But I never knew who he was, and hunting down all my mother’s clients from 1973 seemed a little over the top, even for an obsessive like me.’

  I wrap my right hand around the left side of my neck. It’s a restrictive position, and therefore comforting. It does me good to be restricted. It ought to happen more often.

  ‘So I chose a stand in,’ I continue. ‘A representation. I don’t know if he deserved it, if he was a bad father, a bad man. Probably. We all are, to some extent. The hero of one story is the villain of another. Myths again, you see? That’s how it works.’

  If we’d moved to Maine, some small town from a Stephen King novel, I wouldn’t have had to do all that by myself. I wouldn’t have had to get my hands wet. There would have been a vengeful spirit or a corporeal manifestation of my psyche to do it for me. But we stayed in Camden, and they don’t believe in the supernatural here.

  Den puts his hand on my thigh and squeezes. I’ve heard that squeeze before. It says you’re safe, it’s okay, I love you.

  ‘I promised him sex, drugged him, laid him out in the bath and razored his wrists. Lengthwise, not crossways. That’s how you tell if someone’s serious.’

  My own scars run in horizontal bands, like bracelets. I never wear long sleeves, even when it’s cold. If we lived in Florida, I would never need to. Except that there are no real people in Florida. It’s all make-believe there. All smoke and mirrors.

  ‘I wrote his suicide note in Esperanto, to add a touch of flair to the proceedings,’ I say. I can speak six languages fluently and write decently enough in another four. Plus Klingon, just for the hell of it. Because today is always a good day to die.

  Den nods, picks up his bacon sandwich and takes a big bite. I hold mine, inhale the chargrilled smell and put it down again. I don’t have much of appetite for food.

  I have got—gotten, whispers my alter-ego Bobbie-Sue—drunk on absinthe, bitten off a girl’s finger during a fight in the school playground when I was six years old, slept with a priest, driven the wrong way around the M25 at 3am. I have killed, I have lied, I have broken faith. I am not human. I am not always real. I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. No, wait. That last one was science fiction.

  I am not who I say I am.

  I tell Den these things, but he stays with me, I don’t know why. And I have stayed with him, I don’t know why. Ennui. Disaffection. Habit. Maybe that’s actually the definition of love.

  Outside, the snow is still falling.

  If we lived in Albuquerque then things would be different. If we lived in Albuquerque then we would... actually, I don’t know what we would do. I don’t know anything about Albuquerque other than that it has a great name. But I’m sure they do things better there.

  ‘I want to move,’ I tell Den. ‘Emigrate. To America. To Albuquerque.’

  He finishes his sandwich, wipes his mouth and takes a bite out of mine. ‘Why?’ he says.

  Because I think if we live in Albuquerque, I won’t kill him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I just heard it was nice there.’

  The Sacred Rule

  THE REMA
INS OF old Mrs Waverly’s Yorkie—it had gone missing two weeks ago but it was a snappy, yappy little thing so nobody cared—went slithering into the bin. Bobby’s mother tied up the black plastic with choppy movements and shaking hands.

  ‘Wait until your father gets home,’ was all she said.

  Since she wouldn’t look at him, Bobby went inside and locked himself in the bathroom. His father said that the eyes were the windows of the soul, that you could see all the important stuff there. His father knew everything, so it had to be right, but Bobby was struggling with it. He tried his best, as he did with all his father’s lessons, but it wasn’t coming easy. He needed more practice.

  He stared into the bathroom mirror, holding his eyelids open with his fingers, so that he could have the widest possible view of his own eyes. He needed to make the most of it, because they were likely to be black and swollen shut by the time his father was finished with him.

  Could he see fear there? He thought maybe he could, after all.

  Because there were rules about the conduct of experiments, about the scientific method. Bobby’s work sometimes didn’t meet his father’s standards of neatness or efficiency, but he was trying hard at it. He’d even hoped he might get to upgrade from dogs and cats this year. But now he’d broken the first, the most sacred rule of all:

  Don’t get caught.

  To Show Him a Kindness

  I CAN’T KEEP up any more. I was a whizzkid just like my son once—a prodigy, drunk on glittering possibilities and my own brilliance. But that was a long time ago.

  We barely even speak the same language now. All day long he’s been going on and on about advances in fractal neurochemical upgrading, and I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. I don’t even know what fractal neurochemistry is, let alone what kind of advances have been made in it.

  And yet I was the one who made all this possible, the reason that this facility even exists in the first place. I was the prodigy, the wunderkind, the one who was going to win the fight against ageing, the one who was going to make senility a thing of the past.

  At least I still understand the concept of irony, so I can appreciate the humour of the situation.

  God laughs, you see, at our attempts to put ourselves on His level. It’s a hopeless, pointless task. The mind of man isn’t supposed to be unlimited. I understand that now.

  The breakthroughs I always believed were just around the corner never came. They’re not coming for Bexley, either, despite all his fractal whatthefuckever. You’d think the arrogant little shit would learn something from the constant failure, wouldn’t you—some humility maybe, some respect for his elders and betters. But no.

  If my son is in a spectacularly good mood, the best I can hope for is that he’ll deign to treat me as if I’m a sad irrelevance rather than an interfering hindrance. That’s as good as it gets, now.

  I could leave him to get on with it—leave him to paddle the same, shit-clogged creek I’ve ended up in because that is absolutely where he will go—but I’m a better man than that. I’m prepared to show him a kindness that he would never dream of showing me, and save him from the years of crushing disappointment that are ahead of him.

  I might never have discovered the secret to increasing brain function after all, but I still know how to decrease it. There are various cocktails of drugs lying around in the lab that I’m sure would have the desired effect—that would save Bexley from the inevitable suffering that’s coming his way. But then the application of a blunt instrument to the front of the skull should also do the trick quite nicely. This fire extinguisher, for example. Eminently suitable.

  Because one thing I haven’t forgotten is how much easier it is—how much quicker and cleaner—to destroy rather than create. Creation is God’s province, destruction is Man’s. I’m not sure my son has ever understood that.

  But it’s okay. That’s one thing I can still teach him.

  Deep

  IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a part of me, the violence. As long as I can remember, I have lived with this unholy rage inside me.

  But I don’t want it. I don’t want to be this kind of person. I don’t want to do any more harm. I don’t ever want to hold a knife in my hand again, or see this much blood spilled upon the floor.

  It’s always been a part of me, the fury. It lives deep, deep within my heart. But if I just cut a little bit further, I know I can get it out.

  Damnable Behaviour

  A LOT OF people wish they lived in a different time, although most choose the future. They want instant teleport, robot housekeepers and Google implanted directly into your brain.

  Not me. I’d choose the past; the days of Jane Austen, when people spoke in complete, grammatically-perfect sentences and an insult was a carefully constructed witticism rather than a torrent of obscenities and spittle.

  In Jane’s time people would say, ‘I am fully sensible of the honour that you do me but must regretfully decline,’ rather than, ‘fuck off.’ We would ride in a handsome horse-drawn carriage rather than a filthy tube train stinking of stale beer and half-eaten hamburgers.

  And if Pat started going on at me again, calling me a stupid bitch that needs a good slapping, the man opposite us in the carriage would stand up and say, ‘Sir, I must object to your damnable behaviour towards the lady. Desist this instant, lest the rules of chivalrous conduct force me to intervene.’

  But Jane Austen’s been dead for nearly two hundred years, and the man opposite us on the tube just goes back to the Evening Standard and turns up the volume on his iPod.

  Safe Place

  RONA KEPT A safe place in her head; a petting zoo she’d gone to with her dad when she was about eight or nine. She couldn’t remember where it was exactly, in the real world, but that was probably for the best. It wasn’t always a good thing when the head-places and the real-places combined.

  The trip with her dad had actually been a little disappointing. The rabbits wouldn’t stay on her lap and the goats tried to eat her satchel. She’d stood in something that smelled bad, and her dad yelled at her.

  Now, she was careful to make sure everything around her smelled nice. Good smells equalled good associations, equalled good behaviour.

  The zoo in her head was much better than the real one. The sun shined, the animals never ran away and they always had cookies in the gift shop. Chocolate chip and cinnamon.

  Rona made lots of cookies, although they never looked quite as tasty. She took them with her when she waited outside the school. She made little outfits out of fake fur, too, just like a rabbit. But none of the mothers wanted their boys to wear them, and none of them would let her explain. They weren’t kind.

  Rona didn’t like it when people weren’t kind to her. Or when people came to her house uninvited. Even if they wore uniforms. She didn’t like that at all.

  It was starting to smell bad in the flat again. Rotten. There must be something she’d forgotten to throw away, while she was at the zoo. She’d been spending quite a lot of time there lately.

  Rona thought the bad-smelling thing was probably something real, not in her head. She was much better at telling the difference these days.

  She would deal with it. Soon. That was what normal people did, when there was a problem. They didn’t run into their heads to hide.

  But when she closed her eyes the sun was shining, and she could smell cinnamon.

  Legion

  I FIRST READ The Great Gatsby when I was nine years old, but I was fourteen before I understood it and almost twenty before I realised it contained the secret of life. Namely, that the past is irrelevant, reality is what we present it as and reinvention is the key. It’s like quantum mechanics—on the subatomic level matter is both a wave and a particle at the same time, until someone looks at it. Only then does it choose. We make what we see. I am Schrodinger’s cat: alive, dead and all stages in between, until someone lifts the lid of my box.

  He was a clever fucker, that Fitzgerald.

  The t
rick they missed, though, Gatsby and old F. Scott both, is that you have to keep it moving. Wave, particle, wave. Stay in one shape too long, get fixed, and you get caught in other people’s stories. The cuckolded widower thinks that this is his story, and that you’re the bad guy. Then you lose control. What you need is to make sure you’re always the hero, the protagonist, the centre. And you have to keep an eye on the genre—you don’t want to end up in a tragedy if you can help it, or a Kafka. Waves and particles are one thing, cockroaches are quite another.

  I’ve considered Gatsby himself, obviously, but it’d be too much like hard work. The money and all the stuff would be nice, but I just couldn’t hack all the parties. The bigger the deal, the more eyes it takes to witness. He might have hated them all (apart from Nick, of course. You ask me, that was the real love story) but he couldn’t show it. I haven’t got that kind of tolerance. And Daisy was a waste of space, as well. Frankly, I wouldn’t lower myself.

  So no, Gatsby works as inspiration but not so well as actual model. Not yet, anyway. Maybe at the end, when I’m done, that’s how I’ll go out. It would have a nice kind of symmetry.

  For now, though, for right this minute, I’m thinking about early Elizabeth Swann. (What? That was a great film, and cultural snobbery is never attractive). I need the wide-eyed, harmless exterior so easy to underestimate, with the soul—and skills—of a pirate underneath.

  Because one thing pirates are good at is stealing—especially jewels, treasure and fine young ladies. Especially from other pirates. And Elizabeth, being a fine young lady herself, is ideally placed to undertake such a mission. The light-hearted vibe is important too, because this keeps trying to turn into one of those dark, gritty urban crime thrillers, and I’m not having it. I’ve done the exploring-the-darker-side-of-human-nature thing, and really, you soon find there’s just not that much to explore. I’ve already been a child called It, Ugly, Lolita, Cinderella, etcetera etcetera. Yawn. Human depravity isn’t half as interesting as people think.