Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017. Jonathan Lyon

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СКАЧАТЬ were looking out for me. Your impulsive uprooting was necessary. And you didn’t uproot us from much. A homeless hostel is never going to be a home. We can make this a home. I’m grateful.’

      ‘No,’ she began crying. ‘Don’t try to be nice to me, I can’t take it, I need you to sulk – I need to be the one reassuring you. When you try it, it sounds so fake. This was a mistake weren’t it? I’m a mistake. I’m bad for you.’

      ‘Is this about the money?’ I asked. ‘I don’t care, I made it in an hour. I can make it again. And I’ve still got some.’

      ‘It’s not just your money. I’m a bad mother. But it is the money – I lost your money.’

      ‘Did Kimber take it all?’ I began to understand. ‘Didn’t you tell him it was for our food?’

      Her face became harsher.

      ‘Did he take the money from you?’ I repeated.

      ‘No, he’s not like that, he would never be like that to me – he’d been working, he was in a different mood, it was my fault.’

      As my suspicions grew, the associations of my other senses were heightened: the taste of soil entered my mouth, and her words gained an orange echo.

      ‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘Did he hit you?’

      ‘No, you’re getting the wrong end of everything. It’s not like that.’

      ‘What is it like then? Last week, you were outside his control. But now you’re in his car and in his flat, you’re in his power and you’ve glimpsed something in him that was hidden before?’

      She cried quietly.

      ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘He’s a man in a violent profession. He’s jealous. What did he say about me?’

      ‘Stop analysing, I don’t want to hear it. You’re just trying to sulk again. He’s said nothing about you.’

      ‘You’re lying.’

      ‘It was me, I was talking about you,’ she cried. ‘I was talking about you.’

      ‘And? You’re making it sound like you sold me to him.’

      ‘I just talk too much, don’t I? I hope too much. I believe people too much. I can’t –’ she pushed me away. ‘I can’t. Don’t look at this. Go and shower, you need to wash. At least you can wash your day off you. I tried to wash. Let me just – go away.’

      She covered her eyes with her hands and began rocking herself towards despair.

      I left for the bathroom. The shower had no curtain, so it wet all the walls as soon as I turned it on. The sound of the spraying water glittered with blotchy browns and reds, like a cloud of gatekeeper butterflies. As it warmed, I undressed and rinsed the toast from my mouth in the sink.

      I stepped in. The water felt like hail on my flayed back – but I experienced this as light entertainment. My body hurt anyway, from my myalgia, so the whip wounds were really a relief. Chronic muscle pain has a dissociative effect – every day, for the past decade, my limbs have seemed severed from each other, hovering discretely in uncertain space. My sense of proprioception is in disarray – my nerves regard themselves as hostile. So bruises and gashes like the new ones on my back simply lift me out of my underlying condition. Flesh injuries are insignificant compared to a half-life spent inside a skeleton of barbed wire – of feeling half-disembodied and half-disembowelled – a cloud of phosgene and a soldier’s scream, at once in the same skin. That’s why being beaten feels like being cured.

      The bathroom door opened as I was washing the soles of my feet. I wobbled in surprise. Dawn entered through the steam, staring with an inebriated intensity.

      ‘I remembered the Savlon,’ she said, holding up the tube of antiseptic.

      Again I tasted soil in my spit – though now her voice sounded like it had become foreign to her too. She seemed to be speaking automatically.

      ‘You’re high,’ I said.

      ‘Let me look at your back.’

      ‘Can’t you do this when I’m out?’

      ‘I’ll do it now.’

      I put the soap in the tray and turned around.

      Crying, she traced her fingers along my welts, circling the metal buckle’s indents one by one. I rested my head on my arm against the tiles of the wall, letting the water hit the curve of my spine. Briefly she lifted away her hand – and returned it, thick with ointment, to smooth across my broken skin. I closed my eyes and forgot the specifics of the room.

      But as she smoothed lower, I realised she was teasing me towards arousal. Her other hand joined the first in massaging towards my hips – and then she stepped into the shower with me, wetting her clothes.

      ‘No,’ I said.

      She pushed her hands down my thighs, her soaked skirt rubbing against my back. Instead of earth, I tasted burnt coffee. I tried to swallow it away.

      ‘Just let me make you feel better,’ she said. ‘I’m scared I been a bad mother.’

      ‘I don’t want to.’

      ‘Then why you not pushing me away?’

      She tried to turn me around but I resisted. She kissed my neck and forced her fingers through mine.

      ‘This is… unnecessary,’ I said.

      ‘Then why are you hard?’ She guided my hand in hers towards my erection.

      I let her hold me there for moment, but then shook my shoulders.

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out.’

      I turned off the water – she clutched to me, trying to kneel down. I pushed her away, and took up my clothes and hurried into the living room.

      She followed slowly, drenched, her lips apart but no longer crying, her eyes unclear.

      From my suitcase I removed black jeans, black socks, a black polo-neck, and her fake Dalmatian fur coat. With my back to her, I re-hid most of the money in my boxers and my sock. Then, turning so that she could see, I put the remaining £200 in my coat pocket.

      ‘Why don’t you leave that with me?’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous having so much money on you.’

      ‘It’s more dangerous to leave it with you. It would disappear.’

      ‘I taught you how to pleasure a woman!’ she said, as though this was somehow a retort. ‘I taught you! You never knew what you was doing until I taught you.’

      ‘You taught me nothing.’

      ‘I’m a bad mother, am I?’ She was weeping again. ‘I can remember how you was when we met. You trusted me, and you don’t trust nobody. Why’d you start trusting me?’

      ‘What СКАЧАТЬ