A Case of Knives (38 page)

Authors: Candia McWilliam

Angel told me about the kid, and how he would moon about after her wanting a kiss, never leaving her alone, pestering her, all eyes and teeth and a place at his father’s school.

The animal stuff mostly passed me by, but Angelica was working on me about Lucas. She could see so clearly. She told me about how he had taken me from myself, killed my spontaneity, and I could get back in touch with myself with this one single act. She’d send Dolores out for these chats, to get the food and drinks. Angel’s a feminist, you see. Angel told me my heart was in the right place and I felt good. Then she started seeing me a bit less, being a bit less nice, and the wedding was coming and I felt bad like those timberwolves shut in their cages sloping about watching the children sucking Mivvis and wishing they could suck the children’s little red legs with the white marrow. I felt shut in. I wanted to be like her. She was beautiful and free like that little dish in the opera Lucas took me to, a boy who is a chick and gets the best of everything, bed, champagne and all the attention. I began to dread the wedding, the house in Fulham, the sneaking out to pick up a boy.

The day we went to Chatham, I did feel nervous about hurting him. I thought about the time we had had together. I had a sailor in the ropery that day. The corridor is about half a mile long, and this dirty great hank of rope is getting twisted and twisted till it’s as tight as death, steel and sisal in a twist like hair when you drag a man’s head back and turn it. It was heavy and dangerous and under control. Released, it would have knocked the heads off a line of men. I watched it spin, under eight wedges of light from the eight dusty windows, and I touched the neck of the boy, just above the blue edge of his square-necked shirt, with my mouth. I had made up my mind.

I drew the line at the little fur man’s shop. Dolores was put on to that. I don’t know if it was something racial. I drew the line, but Angel stepped over it. She had feelings about Jews, she said, about how they run the money and the arms and all the fur shops and the law and how they put bad stuff in oranges to give to monkeys in the zoo. ‘You’re talking buckets of eyeballs,’ said Dolores, a bit cheeky, and I saw trouble coming her way, though I couldn’t get why. Angel said she had it in for Jews more than for even all other people. She says these things which aren’t pretty but they make you want to do stuff for her, and bring her things, heads on plates, or on big thin knives.

I knew where Lucas went at night. After all, I went to the same places. The problem up to now had been avoiding him, it would’ve been like asking him to marry me, meeting him in all that shining white. Angel posted all those not too good pictures of animals staked out to all kinds of people and I kitted up.

She’d told me she’d get me away for my alibi and she said – she knows all the social stuff – that the wedding would have to be cancelled. No wedding guest, no wedding, she said.

What did for me was I listened to him. She had said, ‘Do it for me, do it, do it,’ and her voice was like a little girl’s. I felt good and strong, and I knew I could give her joy. I went for him, that was easy. I was quite interested to see him without his manners. But I got carried away and I began to bawl, as I cut him, ‘D’you get me, d’you get me, d’you get me?’

‘Don’t let those be the last words I hear,’ he said, but I was well on the job, cutting away like a doctor on the television.

He started raving about undoing a button. Disgusting, really. I suppose it shows how far some of these oddballs will go.

I looked at him. His eyes showed sections of brown under the lids, which moved very slightly. I had no heart to go on.

I could not cut out all that stuff I had learnt. And it’s not as though I asked to learn it either. I can’t forget about starting from the outside with the knives.

Candia McWilliam
was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of
A Case of Knives
(1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize,
A Little Stranger
(1989),
Debatable Land
(1994), which was awarded the
Guardian
Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories
Wait Till I Tell You
(1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir,
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
.