How to Make Monsters (7 page)

Later, after tidying the
room and rearranging the remaining furniture, Lana left Hayley to play with her
jigsaws and headed for Monty Bright’s place. She had spent the rest of the
morning trying to think of another way, to formulate an alternative plan. Not
long after noon, she had finally faced the truth and begun to prepare herself
for a confrontation.

It was still raining when she
stepped out of the building and into the street. The wooden windows of the
shops opposite were dark and streaky, reflecting dense banks of cloud; the
glass panes had still not been replaced from when local kids had thrown empty
beer bottles through them a fortnight ago. Young people in tracksuits and
hooded sweatshirts gathered on corners and in doorways, their faces featureless
smudges against a flat grey background.

She followed the narrow lanes that
led to the row of shops where Bright kept his offices. The environment
deteriorated around her: buildings low and stooped, windows broken or boarded.
Soon she was standing at the kerb outside a shut-up bookmaker’s. A light shone
sickly and weak from an upstairs window. The sign over the recessed door had
been sprayed with whorls of black paint, its text long since obliterated. Even
the graffiti in these parts was meaningless.

Lana reached out a shaking hand and
pressed the buzzer. It was set into a metal plate that had seen better times. A
low droning sounded somewhere deep inside the building, like the mournful call
of an ailing elephant. Lana closed her eyes, pressed her fingernails into the
meat of her palms.

“It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “Be
fine.”

The door banged open, slamming
against its frame. “What you want?”

Lana opened her eyes and stared at
the man on the doorstep. He was huge – well over six feet tall – and his head
was shaved right down to the glistening flesh of his scalp. His eyes were
narrow, untrusting, and a black snake tattoo ran around his skull, an inch
above his ears.

“Well, bitch?”

Lana took a step back, feeling a
breeze press against her legs. She wanted to run but knew that she could not.
“I’m here to see Monty Bright. My name is Lana Temple.”

The big man laughed; his shoulders
rolled in a strange loose movement. “Lot of people want to see Monty. He’s a
popular guy, especially with the bitches.” His smile was all gold teeth.

“Just tell him my name, fuckwit.
He’ll want to see me, I’m sure.”

The man leaned backwards,
momentarily shocked, and then smiled again. “Stay there.” The door slammed
shut.

Minutes later she was climbing a
dingy stairwell. Three floors: a landing on each, with doors that led into
tawdry boudoirs and chambers of ill-repute. Behind the closed doors she heard
abrasive laughter; the open ones showed her skinny women clad in male-fantasy
underwear; sluttish scraps of red-and-black lace. Bruised smiles and empty
stares.

“This way,” said the big man,
stepping aside when at last they reached the top floor. The muscles bulged
beneath his thin white T-shirt and his tight jeans showed a similar bulge at
the crotch that was nothing short of terrifying. He cupped his balls and grinned,
flashing once again those ugly gold teeth. “Go on in.”

Lana pushed open the door and
stepped into a room that was bare, functional, but surprisingly tasteful.
Framed shop-bought Monet prints hung on the walls, the pile of the carpet was
thick and plush, and the furniture was all real leather. Monty Bright sat
behind a long oak desk, leafing through a pornographic magazine. The cover
showed a woman, bound and gagged, being penetrated by a large black man with a
thick penis. Bright’s orange oval face shone with thinly disguised delight. His
slick black hair looked like a shell or a carapace.

She stood in the centre of the room
and waited to be noticed. Her hands toyed with the hem of her jacket. A
wall-mounted clock loudly ticked away the seconds.

“Hello Lana,” he said without
glancing up, away from the images of bondage and humiliation. His long thin
hands turned the pages, his dark eyes consuming rather than seeing what they flicked
across with an animal intensity. “How can I help?”

He’d said the same thing when she’d
first approached him for money: it was his catchphrase; an ironic combination
of words that she could see amused him on some level that she could not even
begin to fathom.

“I’ve come here…to ask for mercy.”

Bright looked up from the magazine, setting
it aside on the disturbingly neat and tidy desk top. Thoughtfully, he steepled
his fingers under his rounded chin and examined her, as if seeing her for the
first time. His teeth were short and pointed; his tanned face was unmoving,
like a photograph, but as soon as he smiled the illusion wavered. “I see. Is
this regarding the little visit my boys paid you this morning? I see they went
against my orders and roughed you up.”

“That doesn’t matter. All I care
about is my daughter. I’ll do whatever you want, just cancel the debt and let
her have a real life.” The request came before she’d even begun to formulate
it; deep down, this was the cold truth of her heart.

“Anything, Lana? Anything I want?”
He opened a drawer and took out a bottle of whisky and a small shot glass. His
hands were beautiful.

She glanced at the magazine, with
its lurid cover. Black leather. Pink flesh. Red wounds. “Anything,” she agreed,
knowing that she had already sealed her fate, but hoping that her daughter’s
might be better.

****

First he watched her
strip naked and bound her to a chair. He did not even take her to a private
room, just called a handful of his men into the office and told them to watch.
The straps he used where thin and tight; they cut deep into the skin of her
arms and legs. Blood ran freely down her shins, along her forearms. She tried
not to scream but could not stop herself from moaning. The pain at this point
was mild but she knew it could only get worse.

“This one’s a looker, Monty. A real
babe.” She did not see who spoke; the leather mask prevented peripheral vision.

She closed her eyes and thought
about Hayley, knowing that she was securing her daughter’s future. The pain she
suffered here would guarantee that Hayley’s life would be pain-free, at least in
the extreme sense of the word. Any agony Hayley experienced would constitute
the normal, everyday hurts, the small wounds of the masses.

She didn’t even call out when he
started with the whip. Nor did she weep when they took turns to rape her, using
her like a slab of meat as they entered her body in so many ways and via so
many different routes that soon she became numb to the tireless invasion.

****

“Are we done?” She
buttoned her blouse, retaining a small sense of dignity even after what had
been done to her. Her hair was wet and smelled of semen; they had not allowed
her to bathe afterwards, just laughed at her pathetic request, as if in confirmation
that she would never be clean again.

“For now.” Bright sat in his chair
smoking a cigar. His narrow hands were dwarfed by the fat Cuban, looked comical
even. His bare feet were resting on the desk as he reclined in the seat,
content in her debasement.

“What do you mean?” She stood and
faced him, terror creeping upward, moving in waves across her defiled body.
“You promised.” But any promises this man made were subject to the whims of his
radical personality. She’d been a fool to let herself believe this would make
any difference to her situation; but what else did she have to cling to other
than foolish belief?

“I promised nothing. Consider this
visit a down payment. The way I figure it, you’ll have cleared the debt in,
say, fifteen to eighteen months. Even quicker if you bring the girl along next
time. What’s her name, Hayley? Nice and tight and pretty. I’ve seen her through
the school gates, playing with her friends. I think my friends would like to
play with her very much.”

Lana knew that she should rush him,
go for the throat, the eyes: attack the soft parts. But it was futile; he was
too strong, and had always possessed the upper hand. Right from the start, he’d
played her along, upping the odds until she came to him and offered him exactly
what he wanted and could have taken at any point. But he did not want to take;
it was the very act of offering that turned him on, made him shine.

“Where’s your compassion?” she said,
failing to penetrate his armour. “Your basic human decency?” She hated the
desperation in her voice, but it was all she had left to offer.

Bright stood and came out from
behind the desk. He was shorter than she remembered in his stocking feet;
barely came up to her shoulder once she’d put on her heels. His skin looked
soft, malleable, and his eyes protruded like boiled eggs from a face as flat
and round as a polished plate. Bright’s shoulders were hunched; his posture was
awkward, as if years of ingesting horse steroids and the mindless repetition of
punishing routines with heavy weights had altered his basic body shape. He
slowly raised his hands and began to slip off his shirt.

“For that, dear Lana, I’d have to be
human.”

The leather mask had prevented her
from seeing it before, but his naked body was a mass of lumps and abrasions.
They looked like ripe tumours: they dangled in clumps from beneath his armpits,
clustered around his nipples; made a ribbed embossment down his hairless belly.
There were mouths in there, amid the globules and curlicues of flesh, and eyes
that blinked uncomprehendingly. A nose or a sex gland twitched; snot or semen
spilled from its shiny, puckered end. It was a whole community of beings,
perhaps even the souls of the people he’d absorbed as repayment for debts even
greater than her own, loans whose rate of interest was infinite.

“Bring the girl next time. I’ll show
her a whole new world of hurt.”

She was surprised he didn’t try to
stop her as she fled. The door was unlocked and there was no one on the
landing. She clattered down the wooden stairs in her too-high heels and almost
fell out of the main door when it opened at her touch. She could hear Bright’s
laughter following her as she ran along the dark street, looking for answers to
questions she could not even remember asking.

Hayley was in the living room when
she got back to the flat, sitting with her legs crossed and watching the empty
space where they TV had always stood. Lana went to her daughter, but the girl
seemed dazed, out of it. Lana checked her arms for track marks, opened her
mouth and looked inside for the powder traces of pills. She found nothing, so
assumed this fugue was simply another symptom of her disorder, the condition
the doctors consistently failed to explain.

Finally, she carried Hayley through
to her room and lay her down on the single bed, pulling the covers over her
frail form and kissing her sweat-slick forehead. Sirens wailed in the distance,
tracking criminals along shadowy streets. Someone screamed a name, over and
over again, but Lana could not make out what it was. Eventually the shouting
faded, but the backbeat of dance music drifted on the evening air, its sonorous
moan synching with the rhythm of the blood as it throbbed in her veins.

Lana left her daughter and went to
the bathroom. She ran a bath and stood naked by the tub while it filled,
staring at her reflection in the steaming mirror. She lay in the bath and let
the badness boil out of her; the water buoyed her, kept her in the world,
floating like a dead fish. After scrubbing her flesh, inside and out, she sat
up and took the razor blade from the shelf, where it lay behind an old bottle
of baby lotion.

She stared at the veins on her
wrists, wondering if she would ever be able to do it. Then, carefully, she
began the ritual. She gently pressed the blade against the papery skin, turning
it through ninety degrees to make the sign of a cross at the point where palm
became wrist. White marks, fading like the memories of the life she’d had
before. No blood, just a slight pressure, a reminder that a solution was always
there, waiting beneath the surface.

She put away the blade and submerged
herself, listening to the odd sound of water in her ears.

After her bath, she dressed in clean
clothes and returned to Hayley’s room. The girl was still sleeping, lying in
exactly the same position as when Lana had left her. The girl’s eyes moved
rapidly beneath waxy lids; she was seeing something different than the
depressing sights around her. Maybe even something wonderful.

Lana leaned over and watched her
daughter’s sleeping face.

“I’m sorry, honey. Mummy couldn’t
make it better.” Tears ran down her cheeks and she stroked Hayley’s cold cheek.
“I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t manage it. I’m sorry for your illness,
I’m sorry for the things we’ve seen and done. I’m sorry your daddy isn’t around
to see how beautiful you are.”

Hayley’s eyelids flickered, and then
slowly opened. Her eyes were completely white, without a trace of pupil or
iris. She opened her mouth and a trail of saliva ran down her chin.

“Oh, Hayley. Oh, honey.” Lana
cradled her child in her arms and reached out to something she didn’t believe
in. If there was a God, or some kind of greater power that watched over the
fallen, then why would it not answer her pleas?