‘I’m rubbish,’ he kept repeating.
I knew he was just bullshitting, waiting for the perfect moment to clear the table. Which he did, swiftly finish
ing this game and the next.
He wanted to raise the stake for the third game and I said fine.
‘I want a proper game this time,’ he said, to which I said fine again.
He knew the fight hadn’t risen in me yet, so he continued his pretence, considering each shot carefully, aligning the cue and changing his mind, even though he could’ve made every single one.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge, bit off the cap and took a glug. I closed my eyes. To be honest, I was fed up. It was the same every time I played pool. I’d want to play at first, but by the third game all interest in it would’ve seeped out of me and my opponent would nag me more and more.
This guy wasn’t making real shots, only trying to make mine more difficult. ‘You’re letting me win,’ he said with an ingratiating smile.
I went to take a look. I knew he thought I wouldn’t be able to pot anything, so I bounced the white off the cushion and sank a ball before clearing the table until only the black remained. He looked like a soldier about to be decapitated in battle and put his cue to one side, so I deliberately potted the white. It was his turn now.
‘That was careless, brother.’
‘Buy me a beer,’ I said.
He wanted to play another game, not for money this time, but I shook my head.
‘There’s something I want to say, but I don’t know if you’ll understand. Even though you’re older than me.’ ‘Try me.’
‘Every time I play pool I get this nauseous feeling and I end up thinking I’d be better off dead.’
‘I understand. I understand more than you do.’
Of course he understood. What on earth could be worse than spending your life running a pool shack, watching the balls being racked up and sunk, again and again. It was like Dostoevsky wrote in
The House of the Dead:
force a prisoner only to pour water from one bucket to another and then back again, within days they’re contemplating suicide, or else how to get the death penalty.
For lunch I ate fried chicken wings, my Last Supper, and bought a cheap razor. Back at home, I waited and made sure everything was in place. I felt like a craftsman admiring his handiwork.
I closed my eyes and imagined a tangerine light, Kong Jie shaking her hair free, slipping off her silk skirt and curling up under the covers. As she stretches, pressing her lips together, skin pulled taut, her body rises and falls. And I’m like a soldier on a dawn raid, marching my gun through the rainy night. I’m coming, my body
starting to explode open like fireworks, but I stretch it out, until the moment detonates completely. I think I might have more to come, but I don’t.
I tore off a piece of toilet paper and wiped my sticky hands. I felt pretty gloomy. It was as if grey molecules were rising from the ground and falling from the sky at the same time, as if the whole world was drowning in them.
Afterwards all I could think was that the moment was approaching. I could hardly wait. I changed into another T-shirt and some tracksuit trousers, grabbed my switchblade and started pacing.
A
t 2.30 I caught sight of her talking to the guard. She was half an hour late and I’d begun to think she wasn’t coming. Kong Jie saw me and started walking over. She’d tied her hair in a ponytail and she was wearing a bleached white T-shirt and a light blue skirt. A necklace made of crystals glinted around her neck and a small square watch encrusted with gemstones decorated her wrist, along with a set of red prayer beads wrapped around it three times. Her shoes were embroidered with the most delicate lotus flowers. Life for her was this neat and finely detailed. Her eyes were like black pearls, her face as if flushed with rouge, her lips almost transparent, her breasts pert. I was breathless, flustered. A painted maiden.
‘I’m not late, am I?’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
It suddenly struck me with an incredible force that she was letting me kill her. It wasn’t my decision to make. She was the one in charge, walking in front of me, leading me up the stairs towards her death.
‘Why are you still wearing your cap?’ she said.
‘It’s part of the plan,’ I said.
She didn’t understand, so I repeated, ‘It’s part of the plan.’
I watched as the tiniest sweat pearls ran down her arm, glittering and translucent. She looked like she was sculpted from glossy porcelain and she smelt of forest leaves after the rain. I stopped. She turned around and waited for me. In that long, lazy moment, she shielded her eyes with her hand and looked up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud above; the sky was a vast deep blue vault and the sun a ball of welding sparks. She bore her pearly teeth, that stupid smile, like someone not all there in the head. Then she carried on walking.
It was torture, but I swallowed it deep into my belly. I kept wanting to call out to her,
Get as far away from here as possible.
Finally she reached the door.
‘Is your aunt really that difficult to talk to?’
‘It is what it is,’ I said.
She pulled the door open, revealing the inky blackness inside.
‘Why don’t you open the curtains?’
I went in and switched on the light, then closed the metal outer and wooden inner doors behind me.
She faltered. ‘Where is she?’
I grunted a ‘mm’ in reply and walked across to my bedroom, pulled the curtain aside and peeked in.
‘She’s sleeping,’ I said.
Why was I still bothering with this story?
She examined the room carefully, her eyes falling on the suitcase. Then she saw the washing machine.
‘You’re taking this back too?’
I nodded stiffly.
We carried on with our awkward conversation. It felt like I was never going to do it. That is, until the spring in the clock on the wall suddenly burst into action, a bullet piercing through my heart as the bell inside chimed three times in quick succession. I stumbled behind her and fumbled for her waist, covering her mouth and nostrils with my other hand.
Her quick breaths were fighting back. I dug my fingers firmly into her cheekbones. She tried pulling my hand away, gouging her nails into me. She kicked me like an obstinate foal refusing to be tamed. I never imagined she would be so strong and sweat ran from my every pore.
I whispered quickly into her ear, ‘Be gentle, please. I’m begging you.’
Suddenly she stopped, softened. I pulled the tape from the wall and, using my teeth, ripped off a length of about six inches. She was in a daze. As the tape was about to close up her mouth and nostrils, she started pulling and tearing at it. She spat it out like she was spitting out fruit
peel. She flapped and screamed. The sound was piercing. A gunshot drawing a perfect arc through the air on its way to the street outside and into someone else’s heart. I imagined armed soldiers and concerned citizens would be at my door within moments. She tried to keep screaming, but I muffled her.
Then I took out my switchblade, flipped it open and stabbed her in the waist.
This was my first murder. My hands, just like my soul, seemed empty. It didn’t feel like the knife was cutting through her, but rather that her squelchy, muddy flesh was swallowing it.
My thoughts were slipping. It was scary and I wanted to silence them, stop myself, but instead I wrapped the rope around her neck. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it right. I went back to the knife and stabbed her three more times in the chest. The rancid smell of raw flesh rushed into the room in waves. I pushed her, twitching, towards the window and, using the knife, pulled aside one corner of the curtain.
The guard was standing a few paces from his post, listening carefully, unsure if he had really heard what he thought he had. Had the scream come from inside the compound? Was it human? He’d heard her. I watched as he reluctantly went back to his post and assumed his usual position.
My breathing was heavy. Kong Jie was sliding down in my arms, so I let her slip completely to the floor. Her mouth was open, her eyes bulging, her brow, eye sockets, the bridge of her nose, her cheekbones – these normally hidden parts of her face were all jutting out at me. Her T-shirt was now a bright crimson, red with added red, the stain fresh and angry like a peony. The largest peony I’d ever seen. It was horrifying.
I’d destroyed her. She was gone for ever. Like a big sheet of glass thrown from a high building, there was no way of bringing her back.
I squatted down and started scratching the knife across her face and stabbing all over her body. The blade snapped and blood spurted onto my face. Then I took her in my arms and put her head first into the top-loading washing machine before staggering to the bathroom. I glanced back at her legs sticking out of the top.
I took off my clothes, switched on the shower. Blood washed from my body in a river of red. I growled in a deep voice as I scrubbed, before catching sight in the mirror of what looked like a dark stain on the back of my shoulder. It made me shake. I divided my body into seven parts and I started cleaning methodically from the top down. But I stopped and emerged from the shower like a wandering ghost. I started searching in the pool of
blood on my bedroom floor. I couldn’t find it, so I went to the washing machine. There it was, her phone. It still had a signal. I tore the battery out and threw it away.
I went back to the shower and got dressed in my usual T-shirt and gym shorts. I slipped into a pair of trainers, shoved on my cap and swung my bag onto my back. I was ready. I looked back one last time, only to see that I’d left the rope and crackers in the corner of the room. I pulled the curtains across, checked there was no one outside, opened the door and left.
I sprinkled some of the cracker and rat poison mix along the road as I walked. That’d sort out the old dog. My hands were shaking so I threw the rest away.
The guard had his back to me, standing straight as always. I’d tied my laces very loose in the hope of making my shoes quieter when I walked. But as I got closer to him, my confidence was suddenly knocked out of me. What if the bloodstain on my back had started to spread? Had I checked before dressing? I couldn’t remember and wanted to go back.
At that moment his right leg seemed to cramp and twitch. He lifted his shoe from the ground. Then I watched, wide-eyed, as he turned around. I was frozen to the spot, my legs shaking violently, and I heard an awful noise that could only have come from me (why wasn’t I wearing trousers?). My lips trembled. I didn’t
know what to say. I was waiting for him to step down from his post and grab me. But as soon as he recognised me beneath my cap he greeted me with a warm smile. My lips twitched again as if there was something I desperately wanted to say, but instead I merely shook my head meekly.
‘Are you all right?’
I nodded and continued walking over to him. Most likely he was lonely, had no one to share his secrets with.
As soon as I’d walked my body past the guard, my limbs relaxed and demanded that I run. There’s nothing more painful than trying to control that kind of instinct. I lifted each foot stiffly before putting it back down again. One step at a time, I kept going onwards. Once far enough away, I tried going a bit faster, but I was still scared that he might see. I imagined him watching me walk away. He’d just started his shift so he hadn’t seen the girl come in, otherwise he would have realised that the scream must have come from my place. After me like a rocket. Kick me to the ground. Twist my arm behind my back. Pin me down.
A taxi pulled up. I threw my suitcase into the boot and slid into the back, slamming the door shut behind me. Suddenly, I was paralysed.
The driver turned around. ‘Where to?’
‘The train station, quick,’ I gasped.
The taxi slipped along street after street and up onto a trunk road, flying along like a motorboat on a wide stretch of water. I looked back a few times to make sure no one was following before removing the battery from my phone and throwing it, along with my cap, out of the car window.
Outside the light was more beautiful than any I’d ever seen and the people more kind and gentle. They were like innocent children running in a field of flowers, singing and dancing. I imagined shaving my beard at the train station, changing into my suit. The plan was working and soon my transformation would be complete.
I
got to the station entrance with only a minute to spare before they would be closing the platform gates and in front of me was an endless line of army recruits waiting to go through the security checks to enter the station. I thought about cutting in, but decided against it. What was the point? The passengers would be passing through the gates like the last drops of sand in a funnel and the staff would be making their last checks, walking up and down the aisles, locking the doors.
When I was finally inside the station terminal, I pulled my suitcase through to the waiting room for confirmation that my plan was falling apart if nothing else. But the passengers were still sitting around, the train number was still hanging at the ticket gate. Then I became aware of the announcement blasting over the station loudspeakers.
Delayed. My train.
Fortune was smiling on me.
I dumped the T-shirt, shorts and shoes in the toilet and changed into my shirt and suit, fastening my belt and tying the laces of my leather shoes. I combed my hair and applied some gel, sprayed a few spurts of
cologne and put on my glasses. With a slim leather document folder under my arm and my suitcase behind me, I made my way back to the waiting room. My shoulders kept slumping involuntarily and I tried ordering them to straighten up. I felt awkward. But then I caught sight of a middle-aged man watching me and I didn’t feel so bad. In his eyes I was an educated young person with a steady job. We started chatting and he asked what I did for a living.
‘I work for an IT firm,’ came my reply. And I sounded convincing. He looked ready to give me his daughter’s hand in marriage, if he had one.
The noise in the waiting room grew louder. I went in, patted the banister and looked as angry as the rest of them. We had to wait considerably longer for two members of staff to come striding down the corridor and open the gate. I rushed forward, but then turned back around. There was no need. There was no one there: no police, no security, not even anyone from the railways. I waited for the rest of the passengers to pass through before sauntering behind them, as if shepherding a flock of ducks along the corridor, down the steps and onto the platform. A green train lay in wait, breathing out an air of faraway freedom. I pretended to be reluctant to board and climbed up into the second carriage.