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

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СКАЧАТЬ his gaze to mine – and I read its desire.

      ‘Where’ve you been?’ He came to me. ‘You weren’t answering your phone...’

      ‘I’ll tell you…’ I began to lie, but he kissed me, his hand behind my neck, keeping me against him.

      He pulled down his sweatpants and kicked them off over his feet. He tried to unzip my tracksuit top, but I didn’t want him to see the belt wounds beneath.

      ‘Forget that,’ I said.

      He tugged down my trousers and boxers instead in the same motion. The stack of £50 notes fell out, scattering across the floor. I grinned. He grunted interrogatively.

      ‘I’ll tell you…’ I said, but he kissed me again, biting my lips until I tasted my blood on his tongue.

      I associated Francis with the colour of wheat – and this colour grew again to dominance as we kissed. Depending on the stimuli, my secondary senses sometimes associated Francis with wheat’s texture, too, and its taste, and its rustling sound.

      He turned me around. I lowered my face to the granite and he lowered with me, his chest pressed into the buckle welts along my back, his teeth at my ear, gasping nearly with laughter. His joy at my return was elevated by the evasion of his guilt for his girlfriend, and his jealousy at the revelation that I’d just slept with her. He was trying to repossess me, but the intensity of his arousal was due partly to the fear that I was beyond his control, even here.

      Repeatedly, he tried to unwrap his hands from my stomach to unzip my top and have full access to my back – but I gripped onto his wrists, preventing the reveal of the whip lines by keeping his arms beneath me, as if I couldn’t bear to be released.

      He came inside me, pushing me into the countertop edge, his mouth at my neck, sweat pricking where our thighs’ skin met.

      He untensed, reaching around to finish me off, and said ‘I love you,’ which made me come too.

      ‘I love you,’ I said.

      Obviously I didn’t love Francis, but these words marked the end of his seduction. I was aroused not so much by the fulfilment of my desire – to make the straight boy fall in love with me and admit he’s fallen in love with me, first, out loud, without prompting – but rather by the ease with which I had fulfilled that desire. I was aroused by the efficiency of my scheme – having premeditated every move that had led me here, and with no missteps! And now that his resistance was over, it was time to be cruel.

      We hugged, and for a moment my mind left our heat – into a quicksilver that felt as close as I could come to peace.

      He went to the sink to drink from the tap. I gathered my money from the floor and tucked it back into my boxers. The evening light tinted the granite the colour of elderberries.

      ‘Why you been ignoring me?’ he asked.

      He splashed himself with water, smoothing his hands through his hair, his face lifted to the ceiling.

      ‘I had no money,’ I said. ‘And I was depressed… about you not telling Eva. That’s why I went home with her… It’s the only way I could get the situation to an end.’

      ‘You could of warned me.’

      ‘That would have made it worse. It didn’t mean anything. It was for you. And it worked.’

      He sat down against the cupboard, pulling his sweatpants on as he shook the water out of his hair. I pulled mine on too and joined him, resting my head on his wet upper arm. He was not capable of argument, so had to accept my claim that I’d been doing him a favour by fucking his girlfriend. He couldn’t really believe that, but he had to try. Much of my pleasure came from making him lie to himself in this way.

      ‘What’s that money for?’ he asked.

      ‘I need new poems.’

      He wanted to ask further, but was afraid of being hurt by the answer, or of me seeing that he was afraid.

      ‘Dawn said you’re moving,’ he said instead.

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘So you don’t want to move in with me?’ he asked, with a playful indignity that failed to conceal his sincerity. ‘I got a big house now.’

      ‘I noticed. Did you hope you could rescue me?’ I teased.

      He smiled, ashamed of his own affection. ‘Maybe. And we couldn’t do that in a hostel.’

      ‘We can at my new place. I don’t know if it’s going to last – it’s always unstable with Dawn. You probably will still have to rescue me.’

      ‘Why’d you want to live with her? I don’t get it. She’ll steal from you and lie about everything.’

      ‘That’s what I like.’

      In the pause, I admired the muscles I rested on – and thought of the thousands of pulls-ups that had formed them – the trapezius of his neck and the sphere of his shoulders, and the extra muscles of his upper arm that knotted around bicep and tricep, and the wide vascular forearm that ended in a tattoo – ‘SE5’ – his childhood postcode. He had another tattoo on his torso, under his arm, under me – ‘LET GO’, written in gothic script, in some early claim to masculinity that almost contradicted itself. I lifted my wrist to his in comparison – my veins were violet-blue, my skin ghostly and dotted with moles, and my hair was like feldspar in late afternoon light – while his veins were copper-green, his skin darker and unmarked and nearly hairless – smoothed by the coconut oil he lathered into it at night, and which made his hard muscles feel soft when I kissed them. I kissed them.

      ‘What happens with Eva then?’ he asked.

      ‘What you mean?’ I asked. ‘You’re a carnivore now, the kill is done. The more indifferent you are, the more she’ll love you.’

      ‘A carnivore!’ he laughed. ‘Fuck off! What’s that again?’

      ‘It’s from Latin – it means flesh-eater. The Greek version is sarcophagus – but that means coffin. So Greek flesh-eating tends towards death – while Latin flesh-eating goes the other way – towards life, towards sex.’

      ‘And which way do you go?’

      I smiled back. ‘Both ways – I want to be a Greek and Latin flesh-eater – the demon of Europe’s worst fever-dreams – the answering scream of a generation fucked over by a whole millennium.’

      ‘And what about me?’

      ‘Well you just started, you’re still an entry-level Latin carnivore. But look what you did to Eva – you were talking about love – love is an old carnivorous urge – but it isn’t positive, it’s destructive – it’s meant to rip you away from your old mate with enough force to overwhelm habit and convenience – so you choose a new one. Me. That’s all this was. Flesh feeding on flesh. But these urges can warp, in some of us – become more irresistible, more flattened out, and spread beyond the systems of love…’

      ‘That’s not what love feels like to me.’

      ‘That’s СКАЧАТЬ