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

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      ‘Oh yeah, fuck. No, no, no – we need to reset the mood first. I’m definitely not staying driving after that omen of yours.’

      ‘How was that my omen?’

      ‘It weren’t fucking raining dead squirrels till you got in here, was it? I’m marked for death now. Fuck. I’m getting the champagne out and you’re getting in my seat.’

      She parked beside a terrace of improbably white five-storey houses.

      ‘You’ll be a natural babe,’ she said. ‘It’s automatic, it’s easy. Just pretend you are Kensington, ok?’

      She got out and came round to my side. I let her lead me back past the squirrel streaks to the driver’s seat. But before I’d sat down, she began pointing out various buttons and levers, too quickly for a novice to remember. I wasn’t, however, quite a novice – five years ago, I’d spent two weeks sleeping in a car with a girl on a tobacco-manufacturing plant, and she’d taught me how to drive. Naturally, I wasn’t going to tell Dawn this – I needed her to believe that she was mothering me and, too, I needed to further the illusion I fed to her of myself as a prodigy, capable of adapting to any situation with astonishing rapidity.

      So I turned the key, released the handbrake, and immediately lurched into the bumper of the car in front of us, setting off its alarm. Dawn shrieked and slapped me. I stamped the car to a stop, shaking, my confidence gone.

      ‘Let me get in my seat first you fucking psychopath!’ She slammed my door shut and sprinted to the passenger side. ‘The fuck is wrong with you? Get in reverse! Quick! Drive!’

      I obeyed, trying to adapt to the vehicle’s rhythms, my mind narrowed, and backed out into the street – and then pushed the stick into ‘D’ and accelerated forward. Ashamed that I’d failed to maintain my performance, my cheeks flushed – and a taste like over-sweet strawberry jam came over my gums. I hadn’t been the master illusionist, I’d been clumsy. I was ashamed of feeling ashamed – of still having a pride that could be pricked. I tried to cough the taste away.

      She reached behind my seat for her bag and retrieved a bottle of sparkling wine. The alarm of the parked car faded behind us as I familiarised myself with the controls, speeding up a little to turn the corner.

      ‘Don’t speed round a corner sweetheart, you got to go slow for a corner.’

      ‘Shit yeah,’ I said, flushing less as I regained command of my indifference.

      I wondered whether she was humiliating me on purpose – in the same way she’d had me whipped on purpose – as part of some wider ploy to empower herself in a coming negotiation.

      ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You got to go in the deep end. We’re big thinkers now, sweetheart. Take a sip of this –’ she lifted the bottle to my lips and I obediently sipped its lukewarm wine. ‘We’re going Wandsworth – go down there.’ She waved vaguely to our left. ‘Get over the river.’

      ‘Why?’ I moved into the lane she’d indicated.

      ‘Not telling you.’

      ‘So is this car stolen?’

      Her face deflated into a sneer. ‘Don’t be such a fucking fun sponge.’ She punched me on the arm. ‘You think I know how to steal a fucking car? No. This car was an act of love. I’m in love now and I’ve got a man that’s in love with me.’

      ‘Who – that new guy? Is he rich?’

      She laughed and drank again, shaking her head. ‘You know who he is, bitch – Kimber’s the man of my dreams, the love of my life! – I met him down the Rockway the same night you ran off sulking – cos you was jealous of him, weren’t you sweetheart? Ah my sweet sulking little gremlin, you got jealous, didn’t you?’

      She lifted up her hand and waved it in front of my face until I noticed the silver band around her ring finger.

      ‘Is that an engagement ring?’

      She cackled. ‘No, not telling you. My story needs to build. Talk to me about something else first. How you going to spend your money?’

      ‘I dunno… I need to buy a better edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I don’t want any editing. She had her own type of dash, and —’

      ‘You’re really talking to me about dashes? No. Sweetheart, we’re in a brand new car, we got champagne, we’re in the Royal Fucking Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Sweetheart, no. You got to think bigger now.’ She turned the radio on again and baroque orchestral music began shaking the metal beneath our feet. ‘You’re going to buy something stupid what won’t last. You’re going to buy expensive olives and expensive wine – cos we’ve got a new place to live! We’re out of the hostel forever – it’s done, we can’t go back – all our worldly possessions are in the boot of this car, and we’re moving in today.’

      ‘What?’ I braked in surprise. Car horns honked behind us. ‘Shit, what?’ I released the brake. ‘How?’

      ‘I know! Ah, but you’ve made me feel bad now – don’t feel bad about the dashes, sweetheart – I should be more supporting, sorry, sorry. Course you can buy your poems, tell me about them, I’m listening.’

      ‘What? Stop changing the subject.’

      She laughed, tapping the side of the bottle in applause at her own performance. ‘This is how you build tension! But really babe, tell me why Emily should get your money. What’s her best line?’

      ‘I like “soundless as dots on a disk of snow”,’ I said, choosing to play along. ‘It’s about civilisation collapsing. She has a perfect verse about snow as well:

      “This is the Hour of Lead —”’

      ‘Ok shut the fuck up, you win. No more poems, no dashes, I’ll tell you everything.’

      ‘I knew you wouldn’t last.’

      ‘Alright, have a drink first,’ she said, lifting the bottle up to my mouth. ‘But keep your eyes on the road. Oi! Breathe through your fucking nose you amateur. How many shit blowjobs you given with that technique? What the fuck? Breathe through your nose – there you go – I’m not taking this away till you drink all of it –’ I tried to lean my head back, groaning in protest. ‘No, drink it all,’ she laughed, and kept it there until I choked.

      The alcohol could provide a little relief, perhaps – for the welts across my back – but these competed with the deeper pain a decade old – of my myalgia – which no alcohol could help. That pain needed harder drugs than the ones allowed by shops or doctors – it needed the heroin Dawn had promised me – and doctors had failed me long ago, anyway, as they had failed everyone else with my illness.

      I coughed up Dawn’s wine until the taste wove into the sound and scent of sycamore trees brushing each other’s branches – and she settled back into her chair, preparing her story.

      In her silence, I wondered whether I belonged to an invisible epidemic – the greatest epidemic of the twenty-first century, perhaps – since my disease afflicted tens of millions of people, but most of them hadn’t even heard of it – СКАЧАТЬ