Dead Bad Things (7 page)

  "I see."

  "It's an old story," said Derek, shrugging his narrow shoulders. "The same one told by thousands of other lads my age. Nothing new. Nothing unique." There was such a sense of desperation behind the words; and a terrible hunger for recognition which made Trevor feel uneasy.

  Derek looked down at his legs.

  Trevor realised that he was stroking the boy's knee. He stared at his hand, and then glanced up at Derek's face. "How old are you, friend?"

  Derek closed his eyes. "I'm twenty-one."

  "Really?"

  "Really." He opened his eyes again and they looked hard, like chunks of glass. In that moment Trevor would have believed that the boy was older even than him – older than anyone he had ever met. His eyes, anyway, were ancient.

  Trevor struggled awkwardly to his feet and leaned across his guest. His hand brushed Derek's chest and as he lowered his mouth to the other's lips, he felt his own eyes close. Behind them, peering through the darkness, he saw his baby brother's small white face. Desire surged; he forced the game, needing to play it through to the last move.

  They went to the bedroom, where the sheets were already turned down. "You were expecting to bring someone back here tonight?" Derek smiled. He kicked off his shoes and took off his jeans before lying down on the bed.

  "Not just anyone," said Trevor. "Someone. Somebody like you."

  They tussled for a while, jockeying for position: with a new partner, it was often difficult to judge who would be on top. It became a battle of wills, almost a genuine wrestling match, but finally the boy went loose and acquiescent and brought up his knees to accommodate Trevor.

  The moment felt heavy, as if the air had turned to sludge. They moved slowly, their limbs heavy with tension. Trevor turned his head to the side, and when he glanced into the fulllength mirror on the wall he saw what looked like the palm of a hand pressed against the other side of the glass…

  It stayed there for a second, the tips of its fingers white against the glass, and then it pulled away, vanished.

  Trevor blinked. There were tears in his eyes. He returned his attention to Derek, but already he was fading, becoming limp. "I'm sorry," he said, burying his head in his partner's naked shoulder. "I can't…"

  This wasn't the one; it was not his brother. Never his brother.

  He rolled off the boy and lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. The circular light shade was an eye staring down at him; the white plaster on the ceiling was alabaster skin. It was a face. Something was up there, looking down at his vulgar contortions.

  "It happens," said Derek, beside him, but Trevor could tell from his voice that the boy was angry.

  "Get out." He turned back to the mirror. The hand was back, but this time there was another alongside it: there seemed to be an unseen figure leaning against the mirror with both hands. "Just go." The hands clenched, became fists. Then they began to silently batter at the glass.

  "What the fuck are you talking about? Am I too old? Is that it? I can get you someone younger, if that's what you need."

  Trevor sat up on the bed and stared at the boy. "I don't want you here. You're not him, not Michael. You're nobody. I can't do this." He was aware of the fists slamming against the glass behind him, but he could not hear them. They were a sign, a signal; they were telling him what to do. The owner of the fists wanted him to hurt the boy, to pummel him just as the fists were striking the inside of the mirror.

  "Get out before I hurt you."

  Perhaps it was something in Trevor's eyes, or the look on his face, but Derek suddenly moved from the bed and picked up his clothes. He pulled them on as he shuffled across the room, his dead eyes wide and fearful, his skin pale and thin so that the veins beneath made a fine blue tracery. "You're mad. Fucking crazy."

  "Yes," said Trevor, grinning. "Yes, I am." He began to stand, but the boy turned around and ran down the hall. The sound of the door slamming was hilarious, but Trevor could not even begin to understand why it made him laugh.

  Then, when his hysteria was under control, he turned back to look at the mirror.

  There was a figure standing there, but its outline was vague, blurry, as if formed by smoke. He could still see the room reflected in the glass, but
behind
the image was this other, this man. It was like one reality being overlaid across another. The thought both terrified him and filled him with a sense of wonder.

  Trevor watched the figure until it was gone from sight, as if that second reality had stepped back from the first – the weaker image supplanted by the stronger. But even though he could no longer see it, he knew that the figure was there, waiting. The man hovered just out of sight, out of reach, but he would not remain that way forever. And Trevor realised that the man was desperate to reach out to him through the glass.

  He crossed the room and went to the built-in wardrobe, and then he reached up to open the upper door, the one close to the ceiling. Inside the compartment were assorted work clothes – old slacks and stained T Shirts he wore when he was gardening or pottering around the house doing chores. Buried underneath these things was a small lacquered wooden box. Trevor took out the box and shut the door. He turned and walked back to the bed, where he sat down and stared at the black box. Slowly, tenderly, he brushed his fingers against the lid. Then he opened the box.

  Inside were photographs. Not many of them, just a few. Each of them was of a small boy with thin legs and a sad face. The boy's hair was fair; his eyes were pale. He was beautiful.

  "Michael," said Trevor, his eyes filling with tears. "I miss you." He picked out a picture which showed his brother standing in the shade of a high wall. The boy was wearing a pair of ice-blue shorts and a Disney T Shirt. He was not smiling. He had never smiled – not even before Trevor started doing those things… the things he was unable to stop.

  Trevor was weeping now; his throat felt raw, his cheeks were damp. He had an erection. A gap opened up inside him. It was a place that he kept hidden, but it was always there, just beneath the surface. It never left him, this gap. It simply sat there inside him, waiting to be filled. But it could not be filled; it would be empty forever, because his brother Michael was dead. Trevor had killed him. He had not lifted a hand to deliver the final blow, but he had done it all the same – he had killed the thing he had loved.

  When he was thirteen years old Michael had cut off his own genitalia and bled to death, all because of Trevor. To stop him from doing those things… those horrible, wonderful, treacherous fucking things that he did.

  Those acts…

  …oh, such acts… such amazing acts of love…

  His shoulders hitching, his vision blurred by grief and shame and regret – and, yes, desire – Trevor looked at the mirror. He could see nothing in the glass but the reflection of his own sad world, a self-created prison in which he was punished over and over again by his unnatural passions.

  "Help me," he whispered. "Please help me."

  It occurred quickly, and if Trevor had not been staring at the correct spot on the glass he might have missed it. It happened fast, but it
happened
. It really did happen.

  A small, thumb-sized graze appeared in the top right corner of the glass, like the sudden damage caused by a pebble hitting a car windscreen. It sounded like a gunshot. Trevor stopped crying. He stood and approached the mirror. The deformation did not vanish. It was there. It was real.

  Then something else began to happen, and Trevor was held rapt, his attention focused completely on the mirror.

  Slowly, as if put there by a steady, careful hand, a word appeared – backwards – on the glass. It was a name, and it seemed to be written in greyish water, or perhaps spittle. Semen? Certainly it was some kind of liquid.

  The name was also a word, and it was one Trevor knew well; he had dreamed of it often, and none of the dreams ended well. They usually ended in a wash of Technicolor bloodshed, when he killed the owner of that name.

  The name was:
Usher.

  He reached back inside the lacquered box and took out what was buried under the photographs: the small cellophane wrap of heroin and the drug workings sheathed in an old rag.

  As Trevor unwrapped the burnt spoon and the clean hypodermic syringe all he thought about was that name. But soon his mind would be free and he'd think of nothing… nothing but flying. Soon he could fly close to that other reality, the one he had glimpsed behind – or within – the mirror.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

Later that morning I was sitting in a small café beside Upton Park underground station, watching the ebb and flow of punters from a massage parlour located above a cheap-looking tanning salon across the road. The grotty red door of the walk-up massage parlour was shut tight to the frame, and a square of paper tacked below the buzzer drew many a casual glance. I imagined it had names like Karla or Kandy written upon it, along with the words "model for hire".

  I sipped my milky coffee and stared at a tall man with bad acne scars as he walked past the door for perhaps the fifth time in a period of twenty minutes. He'd been in just about every shop along Green Street and bought a small selection of items: a newspaper, some breath mints which he kept popping into his mouth at the rate of one capsule each time he passed the red door, and what looked like a large plantain wrapped up in a torn brown paper bag. At least I assumed it was a plantain: its long, curved shape also suggested some kind of sex toy.

  I tore my eyes from the street and took in my immediate surroundings. There were just a few people in the café at that time of day – a clutch of morose customers caught in the friendless gap between the breakfast and lunch crowds – and the place seemed slightly melancholy. An old man read from a horseracing paper at a table near the toilets, a stubby pencil gripped loosely in one hand. Two tired-looking middle-aged women (perhaps they worked across the road) argued quietly in a European language I could not recognise, waving their hands before their thin, drawn faces as if trying to summon demons. A slim young man in a smart suit sat at the counter and sipped orange juice from a smeared glass. The man's briefcase was resting at his feet like a loyal puppy; he had the side of one leg pressed against the case, so that he would feel the disturbance if anyone tried to take it. He was staring into space, a strange little half-smile on his lips.

  My coffee had gone cold. I caught the eye of the chubby waitress and she hurried over, her meaty forearms pale against the dark blue of her tabard. She wiped her hands on her skirt as she stood beside me. Then she took out a small ring-bound notebook and a stubby little betting shop pen from the front pocket of her tabard.

  "What can I get you, deary?" She sounded like proper old East End London stock: even her accent reminded me of ancient black and white films I'd seen as a lad. She probably lived in Romford.

  "Could I have another coffee, please? White. One sugar."

  She scribbled the order down on her pad, snatched up my cup, and turned away, clearly disappointed that I had not wanted anything more than a drink. I considered ordering a list of items from the dog-eared menu just to relieve her tedium but then dismissed the idea as silly.

  I came to this café every day, sometimes for breakfast and other times just to sit in this same window seat and watch the world go by. It was the farthest I'd ventured from the grey zone since arriving in the area, and the proximity of the underground station provided a strange kind of comfort. If I wanted to, I could head into the city… or I could simply watch the commuters going about their business. It was the illusion of movement, the notion of travel rather than travel itself, which helped calm my nerves. I didn't really
want
to go anywhere, but if for some reason I changed my mind I could hop on a train any time I liked. Destinations beckoned; journeys promised options I would probably never take.

  That was good: the promise of escape. It was something that had always been lacking in my life, so I grabbed hold of the illusion whenever I could.

  The waitress brought my coffee and favoured me with a tired smile.

  "Thanks," I said, nodding.

  She raised a hand and moved slowly away, spinning almost daintily on her heels, her gaze drawn to the window and the people passing by on the other side of the dirty glass. The way she moved was like a slow, sad dance step and she kept her eyes on the window. I wondered if she was looking out for someone special or just watching for the sake of it – much like I was.

  Watching; just watching. Waiting to be noticed.

  "Excuse me."

  The waitress turned around, her eyes now focused on me.

  "Sorry, but I'm suddenly hungry. Could I order a bacon and egg roll? Lots of ketchup." It wasn't a lie; my appetite had returned and my stomach ached because it was so empty. "With a side order of fried tomatoes."

  "Coming right up, deary." She seemed happier now that she had a proper order to fill, something to do with her time. "Be back in a tick." I wondered if she spoke that way at home, or if it was an extension of the uniform she put on for work. I watched the gentle swaying of her ample behind as she stepped briskly behind the counter and went into the kitchen to speak with the cook.

  People: despite the urge to keep away from them, I could not help my fascination with how they lived, how they existed in such a world as this. It was part of my curse, I supposed. I wasn't sure if I'd been this way before my wife and daughter were killed or if it was something I'd picked up since then – a sort of displacement activity for my imagination. Either way, humanity became more and more like a drug to me. Maybe one of these days I'd suffer an overdose.