PERSPECTIVE

By Ben

You have your back to me. I watch your back become smaller as you recede from me, towards the vanishing point indicated by the street’s parallel lines. One point perspective. The further you go, the more objects interrupt my view of your vanishing back. Lampposts, trees, cars, until eventually, you will disappear completely. I think about how if I were standing at the other end of the street, I would be watching your face growing larger. But I am here, outside my house, watching your back becoming smaller.

I have already learned not to bother trying to read anything in anyone’s face. We have become experts in controlling, to the millionth degree of subtlety, what our faces show, and what they hide. If I could look into your eyes now (which I can’t) or study the tension in the muscles around your mouth (which I can’t), I’d see whatever you decided to allow me to see. If I want a window to your soul, I’ll look at your back.

Example: The fullness of the backpack that you are wearing is unbearably eloquent. Your shoulders, I can see, are straining up against the weight of it. Whatever mementoes you decided to keep from these past few years are weighing you down. I don’t want to carry that kind of weight around, so whatever you’ve left behind, I’ll probably throw away. Most of it, anyway.

Next week I will be at a concert with two of our friends. In my rear pocket I will have your now unwanted ticket. Between now and then, the band will travel across a continent, growing larger and, presumably, more audible as they approach. In the time it takes them to do that, and to arrive on this island, to unpack their instruments and their gear and perform their sound check and strike the first notes of the evening, in that time, you will have receded entirely out of sight.

I will stand a little bit behind my friends, and I will read their backs. I will study the spine of my friend, a sharp-peaked mountain chain visible through the fabric of his impeccably cool t-shirt. I will see the back of my other friend, a back which hurts so badly she wants to cry, all the time, and yet she spends her time taking care of the people around her. Perhaps other people will look at my back, and if they do they will notice an imbalance, a terrific weight centred around one rear pocket.

As we watch the band and listen to their music, we will see other things retreating into the distance. Something in the music will remind us of science classes, when we were fourteen, learning about the inflation of the universe. We will remember something vague about every point accelerating away from every other point, and we will start to see it happening. I’ll see my friends accelerating into the distance, on their own unique trajectories and I’ll look down at myself and see every part of my body growing further and further apart. An arm vanishing over the horizon. A thought and a word going in opposite directions, becoming ever more remote from each other. From this point, in the middle of our twenties, we will even be able to see time becoming bigger and further away.

All that is still to come. I am still standing outside my house, still watching your back disappearing, and waiting for myself to start dissolving.

CESTODE

By Ben

It’s about 3 am, and I’ve just locked the bathroom door behind me. There’s no real purpose in locking the door; I’m the only one who lives here now. It’s an old habit, though, and at times like this, old habits often step in as a sort of co-pilot. The rest of my brain is concerned with things other than the bathroom door. My insides feel like somebody is running a branch of bramble back and forth, up and down the length of my intestines. I’m sweating and when I pull the string cord that operates the shaving light over the mirror, I see a red, wild face. My eyes look like dirty windows with something shadowy moving around behind them. My face hasn’t looked like my own for several weeks. I’ve been watching it ageing quickly into the face of a stranger. The sensation of something splitting inside seizes my attention. I pull off my boxer shorts and sit on the lavatory, with my bare feet smacking around in agony on the tiled floor. Something is leaving my body in a horrible fashion. It just keeps coming out, yards and yards of it. Oh God.

I stand up, shakily. I open the bathroom window to breathe in some cold air, and lean on the window frame for a while, feeling the sweat on my face and neck cooling and drying. Then I turn around and go back over to the toilet bowl, just to look. There’s this thing, long and flat and whitish. It looks like a strip of fat from a rasher of bacon, but it’s far too long for that, and it’s moving, swimming and squirming in the water. I see its head (‘scolex’, I learn later) and its four sucker things. Then it seems to panic, and it starts thrashing around like mad. I’m about to close the lid on it, but as my hand goes out, the thing whips right out of the bowl. I think I actually scream, and I turn and try to pull the door open, forgetting that I locked it on the way in. When I turn back, it has settled again, coiled up like a snake in the washbasin. Its head is resting on top of the coils, as if it’s looking at me.

‘Hey, bud,’ it says.

‘What’s your name?’ it says.

‘You can call me Tom, if you like,’ it says.

I perch on the side of the bathtub, as far from Tom as I can get, and stare stupidly at him. He’s talking to me with this lazy, growling, shambling, sleepy voice. If I’d ever imagined how a tapeworm would sound if it could speak, it would not have sounded like this. This sounds like Tom Waits. I haven’t listened to Tom Waits since before I was married, I realise. I swallow my revulsion and quell my disbelief. After all, it’s company.

‘Sorry about all that, you know, all that scratching around. Just had to get out of there.’

‘That’s ok, I suppose.’ I don’t know what else to say.

Tom is on the move again. He’s winding over the designer taps that I had put in a few years ago, moving slowly and deliberately. He’s making judgements on my furnishings. After a while, after he slips round the edges of the wall-fitted up-lighters, he begins humming with approval. He flops down onto the mocha-brown Italian tiles, and slips across the heated towel rail. He coils up around the warm chrome bars. There used to be fresh, white towels there every day, but I don’t bother with that, these days.

‘This is all real nice’ he gurgles. ‘Real nice.’ Then he keeps going, moving around the entire bathroom, commenting on all the fittings, the paint colours, the Swedish wooden bench and shelves, and the big glass jar full of sea-shells and coloured rocks that my ex-wife collected, one summer in Cornwall. I always wanted to give the bathroom the feeling of a sauna, lots of blonde wood and clean lines. Maisie kept saying it was too ‘masculine’, she kept adding little decorations, bits of carved driftwood, clamshells for soap dishes, things like that. Tom seems to like it all, though.

I try to spark up a conversation. ‘Don’t get too attached’, I say, awkwardly. Tom just goes on making happy, gurgling, bubbly noises.

‘Yeah, well, I’m selling it,’ I say. ‘I’m selling the house, and moving somewhere smaller.’

‘Uh huh,’ he says, not showing a lot of interest. ‘Why?’

I change my mind. I don’t feel like discussing this with him, especially if he’s only half listening, so I tell him I’m going to make coffee. I unlock the door and leave him in there while I go downstairs to put the kettle on. When I bring the coffee back up into the bathroom, I feel ridiculous. I’m carrying a tray with a whole coffee set laid out on it. A smart cafetière, little coffee cups from Finland with a matching milk jug, German coffee spoons that cost more than the rest of the set combined. I balance the tray on top of the cistern. Tom is in the bathtub now, laid out in long coils that run several lengths of the tub. He must be four metres long at least. I plunge the coffee and pour out two cups. ‘Milk?’ I ask. Tom shakes his scolex. I put his coffee cup in the bathtub for him, and he dips his tail end into the cup, absorbing the coffee directly. His body shakes with pleasure.

‘Oh, boy’, he sighs. I think about trying a different topic. He’ll have forgotten the other one anyway. ‘So you’re leaving,’ he says. ‘What gives?’

And despite myself, it all comes out. I tell Tom all about my life. I tell him about my wife, and my kids, and how my kids grew up and moved out, and how my wife grew up and moved out.

‘And now you?’ says Tom.

‘Just moving out,’ I say. ‘Like you. Why did you come out?’

‘Well, bud, in truth, it was getting pretty boring in there. It used to be fun, it really did. There was good food coming through, something different every day. And you used to do a lot more. Now you just sit around. Drink a beer now and then. Pasta bake every day.’

‘I’m no fun anymore? My tapeworm is dumping me?’

‘Sorry bud.’ He absorbs a little more coffee. He avoids my eye. I feel cheated.

I want to know how I ended up with Tom in me in the first place. He tells me the whole story. I fill in the details from my side for him. He was a larva in a piece of beef when we first met. It was my first date with the woman who would eventually become my ex-wife. I ordered a steak, medium rare. It came almost blue, but I didn’t want to complain and send it back. That was a pattern of behaviour that would last long into our relationship. Tom lived in my gut for a long time as a larva. He was about the size of a pea. Maisie and I started seeing each other regularly. We discovered a mutual love of Japanese cinema and we went to the BFI together a lot. Three years after that first date, we got married. We did it quite cheaply, and we held the reception in kind of big barn that had been turned into a health food café. I didn’t like the venue much, but I was already in the habit of just going along with Maisie’s ideas. I didn’t resent it; more than anything I wanted her to be happy. There were butternut squashes hanging from the ceiling and sacks of lentils around the walls and everyone was getting drunk on beer that we were smugly assured was pesticide-free. After we were married, I took on a new job. I left my job as a projectionist and started as a junior manager in a company that claimed to offer great promotion opportunities. Tom started to change. He grew and grew. His proglottid segments became differentiated. He was becoming an adult. Maisie and I stopped renting and bought our first home, a basement flat. We bought a big Kurosawa poster to hang in the living room, an original one with Japanese writing, not English. Then later we moved to a little house. We took the poster with us. The frame got damaged in the move but we hung it up anyway. Tom kept producing more proglottids, always from the neck. ‘They always grow at the neck,’ says Tom, but he can’t explain why. As quickly as he grew new segments, the old ones would break off and leave my body to reproduce. Maisie and I had kids – first Mark, then, four years later, Grace. When Grace was five, we moved again, to this house. This time we didn’t take the Kurosawa poster. We decorated this house more expensively, but with less excitement. Tom was up to full size by now. He says it was already feeling cramped, even then.

I talk more, and Tom talks less, and then we take a break from piecing our stories together to sip our coffee. It’s starting to get cold. I’m getting numb from sitting on the lid of the toilet. I get up to take my dressing gown from where it’s hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and notice my boxer shorts, still crumpled in the corner. I feel mortified at firs, but Tom doesn’t seem to have noticed my lack of underwear, and, after all, he’s lived in my colon for thirty years. I take my dressing gown and fold it into a cushion to sit on. I put my coffee cup on the shelf that runs along the bottom of the window, and notice a faint light through the frosted glass.

Even when I set out the whole story like this for Tom, I can’t quite understand the transition from those first years with Maisie to this. We used to struggle to count all the things around us that took on a beautiful warm glow whenever we looked at them. Just ordinary things, like shoes, and ice-cream cones, and train tickets, they would reflect our happiness back at us without fail. Now the same objects look as if they’ve been drained of colour and hammered flat. I walked past out first flat a few weeks ago, in a fit of nostalgia, and I almost walked straight past it without noticing. I can’t pin down what was different. There was the same metal staircase leading down from street level, and the same two streaky windows, that now peered up at me mournfully. Somebody else’s curtains were hanging behind the windows anyway.

I’ve been telling Tom all this, and more in the same vein. I can’t tell whether he’s listening or not, but I’m pretty sure he is. We seem to have reached a sort of understanding. I reach out for my coffee again and take a sip, but it’s truly cold now and I spit it into the basin. Tom has wrapped part of his body around a big sponge of Maisie’s that had been sitting on the edge of the bath, and he’s busy tightening and relaxing his coils, squeezing out the water that had soaked into the sponge the last time I had a shower.

We’ve been talking for hours. We fall back into silence for a while, until the timer on the central heating clicks over and we hear the boiler rumble downstairs in the kitchen. The radiator warms up beside me, and I lean over to push the window open. The morning air wafts in, chilly and clean, bringing with it the smell of the apple blossom from the tree that Mark planted on his tenth birthday. I hang out of the narrow window, resting on my forearms, and Tom pops up next to me. I can see the sunrise if I lean right out, and it occurs to me that Tom has never seen the sun before. I let him crawl along my arm, which I hold out of the window, stretched as far as I can reach. He hums happily as he watches the dawn.

‘I’ll miss you, Tom,’ I say.

‘Yeah, I’m going to miss you too.’

‘Really?’ That surprises me.

‘Of course, bud. Don’t you think I’ll miss you?’

‘But you wanted to leave. You chose it. You could have stayed inside, if you’d wanted.’

‘Sure, I know that. I had to leave though. Even so, I mean, you’ve been like my whole world for thirty years. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.’

‘Well.’ I’m touched. Then a terrible thought comes into my head. I see a ripple flow down the length of Tom’s body and I think the same thought must have struck him too.

‘Hey, Tom.’

‘Yeah?’

I notice how dried up he looks now. ‘Um, what are you going to do now? I mean…’

‘Yeah. I know. Oh boy. Do me a favour, bud?’

‘Anything.’

‘Flush me.’

Those are his last words. He’s crumbling in my hands as I carry him from the window to the toilet. It takes some time to get rid of him entirely. I have to stop and wait for the cistern to refill several times before all of him is flushed away. I pick up my cold coffee and swill it around in the bottom of the cup for a while. I stack everything back onto the tray, and think about going downstairs to make some more. Then I get distracted by the sunrise, and the coffee can go to hell.

FIVE YEARS

By Ben

My first thought is that a fight must have broken out. There’s a crowd of people outside Currys.digital. It’s after closing time so I can’t understand what they’re doing there. The people towards the back are fighting to get to the front. The people at the front are standing completely still. The display lights and the televisions in the window are illuminating their faces. The light in their faces and their expressions remind me of stained glass windows.

I cross over to the crowd and try to see what they are gathering around. I stand up on my toes to look over their heads but I can’t see anything. I try to wriggle in between people, pushing my way to the front, not at all sure that I want to see what is there. Someone’s elbow hits me in the teeth. Someone’s sweaty hand slips off my shoulder, twisting my t-shirt. I reach the front of the crowd, where people are standing staring. They are looking in through the shop window. They are looking in at a television screen.

I stare with them for a while before I realise what I’m looking at. BBC News 24 is showing. The red band at the bottom of the screen says ‘UN holds disaster conference’. Some other words are scrolling underneath. There is a man on the screen. I recognise him as a reporter but I can’t remember his name. I’m still standing and staring and I notice his cheeks are shining with tears. He is reporting from outside the United Nations building where it is still daytime. The sun is bouncing off the glass walls and off his wet face. I hear him choking out words like ‘environment’ and ‘life-support’ and ‘resources’. There are people on the street with him. They are standing silently as well. The news cuts to the inside of the General Assembly. They are sitting in silence there.

The reporter comes back on the screen, and I see the face of the man next to me, reflected in the shop window, super-imposed over the face of the reporter. It looks like a hologram seen from the wrong angle, caught halfway between two images.

Five days. Who didn’t know this was coming, really? The shock is not that it’s the end. It’s that we know when it is coming. We know how it is coming. We can count down the days and we can picture the scene. I don’t want to picture the scene.

*

I spend the next two days just walking. I walk all over London. I see people dropping like hailstones from the tower blocks.

On the third day, Friday, I’m walking through the city and I look in through the window of this place called MARINE ICES. It’s a low, white building that doesn’t fit in with its neighbours at all. It looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1950s. First I think there’s nobody in there. The lights are on, but the TV attached to the wall in the corner is off. It’s the only TV I’ve seen all day that hasn’t been tuned to the news. Then I notice there’s a girl sitting in one of the window seats. She’s sitting there with a pink milkshake. She has a transparent straw to drink it with, and I watch the milkshake moving slowly up inside the straw. She raises her eyes from the drink and looks at me. She pushes a stand of black hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear. I go in and sit down with her. She smiles so easily I realise there’s no way she’s heard the news.

She keeps smiling, and we keep talking, and we leave the empty ice-cream parlour. The street lamps have stopped coming on at night, and it’s too dark to see her face while we walk. I keep picturing her pushing that strand of hair away from her eyes.

We get to the top of Primrose Hill and turn to look over the city. There’s an orange glow across the horizon that I hope she takes for light pollution. We sit down on the ridge of the hill. She smiles at me. I am not going to tell her. We warm each other’s hands. We stay up on the hill all night.

We walk all day Saturday. The heel of my trainer comes loose. She loses a hairgrip and we crawl around until we find it again. I try my hardest to pretend that finding the hairgrip is really important. When the sun goes down on Saturday evening, the orange glow is brighter, and taller, and closer. She asks me about my plans for the future. I am drowning in a sea of violins. I make up an answer. She smiles, pushes that strand of hair out of her eyes, and says they sound like good plans.

SOME CONVERSATIONS

By Ben


1.
Mom: So Mason said that you would work together when you get home, and do the tidying in there.
Mason: What does that mean, VAT?
Dad: VAT, it’s a. uh, tax. If they take it out it’s cheaper.
Mason: Why is it cheaper if they take it out?
Dad: ‘Cause you don’t pay the tax.
Mason: What’s tax?
Dad: Tax is a value assessed to…another…it goes to the government.
Mom: They took the whole window out between the first and second floor. That was pretty cool. Whose idea was that?
Dad: Brian’s.
Waiter: Cheese and beans?
Dad: Cheese and beans? That’s me.
Mom: Who wants tomato?
Mom: So will you guys do that, when you go home, will you empty the bookshelves?
Waiter: Chips?
Dad: Mm hmm. You have any ketchup?
Waiter: Yes, ketchup, anything else for you?
Kyle: You wanna try mine?
Mom: Yeah. You wanna try mine? It’s good.
Waiter: They need forks, also?
Kyle: Can I get some ketchup, Dad?
Dad: Like that?
Kyle: Put it right there.
Mom: Oh, this is good. It’s perfect.
Dad: Can I taste it? Wow, that’s good.
Mason: Try mine.
Mom: Can I taste it? Mm. It’s good. Wow.
Kyle: Dad, which of these smoothies do you like better?
Dad: I dunno.
Kyle: Mom, which one do you like better?
Mom tastes smoothies
Kyle: Do you like mine better?
Mom: I like yours a lot. Yours was sweeter. Mason’s was tangier.
Mason: That’s maybe ‘cause mine has more seeds in it.
Kyle: Ali…Ali said that her mom emailed you.
Dad: I haven’t been on the computer since we left. Huh? I saw your eyes pop out of your head.

2.
A: Can I borrow the book?
B: What, the shit one? It’s signed, did you see how it’s signed?
A: No, I didn’t.
B: Here, my own signed copy from Crystal Love. Who the fuck would come up with the name Crystal Love?
A: Is it shit, have you read it?
B: No, but I spent an hour talking to here and she’s a dick.
A: I don’t think I’m going to read it now.
B: No, you should, you can read it and let me know if it’s good.
A: I might just take it and keep it for a while.
B: Yeah, sure.
A: Anyway, I’ve come to give you blessings. Of all kinds, heart, body and soul.
B: Thanks.
A: And a very merry Christmas.
B: Happy new year.
A: And can I have a new CD?
B: Seriously, you’ve heard all my happy songs. That’s it
A: You can find some.
B: I’m not spending money on it.
A: This is your homework, you can find some.
B: Maybe xxxxxxxx can make you a happy CD. Maybe xxxxxxxx, he’s like a ray of sunshine.
A: (singing) Walking on sunshine, ooh, ooh.
B: He’ll probably put that on for you.


3.
Phone rings
A: Hello.
B: Hey xxxxxxx – even though I’ve had the most horrible day and I’m feeling shitty and I’m not going to the doctor’s because neither is xxxxxx, we are up for going for a drink. Whereabouts are you?
A: I’m just over in Primrose Hill. Where are you going?
B: Are you? We’re probably going to the social? Are we? Or are we going to Camden? We’re going to a pub. Right, we’re going into Camden, So we’re just going over to get changed and then we’ll go over to the office and I’ve got a couple of things to do. So we’ll probably get to Camden about half five. And I’ll explain all about my day, and xxxxxxxx will explain her day, and we’ll all explain because we are Explainers.
A: (Chuckle) OK, I’ll give you a ring at about half five and see where you are.
B: OK cool. You’re talking very quietly, are you still in a café?
A: Mm hmm.
B: Ha ha, OK.
A: OK
B: (More laughter) See you later then.
A: See you in a bit.
B: Bye.
Twenty minutes later, outside work.
B: Hey xxxxxxxx -
A: - Hey -
B: - sorry, it’s been a horrible day -
A: - that’s OK, um, it might sound weird, but I’ve written down our conversation –
B: OK
A: - It’s the new assignment for that thing I’m doing, you know, with my friend?
B: Oh, yeah, OK.
A: Is that OK? It might go on a blog.
B: Uh, yeah. It hasn’t got anything about me saying ‘wank’ in it, has it?
A: Uh…
B: I don’t think I’ve said ‘wank’ today.

THE BEARDED MAN

By Ben

Soho always made him feel uneasy. The glare of strangers bothered him, the attention and pestering from all quarters. From beggars, restaurateurs, hookers, religious zealots and free-paper pimps. It all upset his balance. It crowded him unbearably.

There had been an accident on the road. Ambulances filled the narrow street, and beyond a web of barrier tape he glimpsed a deeper tangle of metal and worse. The ambulances’ lights cast the scene in a slow surreal strobe, as paramedics moved back and forth. He turned back, his usual route out onto Oxford Street blocked. He could catch a bus from Piccadilly Circus instead. As he turned his back on the scene of the crash, a figure moved across the periphery of his vision.
Funny, he thought, that amongst all those emergency crews in their hi-viz jackets, the one to stand out should be dressed so soberly, and half-hidden beneath a black umbrella.

He saw the same man not much later, as he reached the bottom of Dean Street. Passing a dimly-lit shop front promising a range of adult literature, he saw the dark suit and the black beard that stood out so starkly on a white, rubbery face. He hurried on, heading down into Chinatown. He quickened his pace to give himself the chance to pause outside a restaurant, pretending to scan the prices of the menu. The man was still behind him. The umbrella was folded now, and it swung like a metronome as the man took his measured steps along the street.
Relax, he thought, lots of people are going this way to find another route home. Still, he took the long way around to Piccadilly Circus, rather than take the shortcut through the alleys of Chinatown.

At the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, the man caught up with him. The hand on his shoulder made him think of an exquisitely animated puppet, the joints of the fingers like finely carved wood.
‘Oskar Lang?’ said the man in a voice as cracked and gritty as the pavement they stood on.
‘…no.’ said Timothy Clarke, quietly.
‘Scheisse.’

*

They had been standing together under the black golfing umbrella for over an hour and Tim was still struggling to adjust to what he had been told. He tried to arrange the facts in his head.

1. The car accident was not an accident.
2. The bearded man had deliberately caused the crash, in order to kill Oskar Lang.
3. Four people had been killed in the crash. None of them was Oskar Lang.
4. Oskar Lang looked very much like Timothy Clarke, and was now sitting over the road from them, in the window of the King James.

If Lang knew that he had just been the object of an attempted murder, he didn’t show it. He was sitting contentedly in the pub, in full view, talking and laughing with another man. The pub threw a warm light onto the street, an orange glow that spread over the road and stopped just short of Tim and the bearded man. The black umbrella hid them in a black void that seemed to Tim to be as solid and confining as a prison cell. He could hear the bearded man, still talking insistently in his ear.
‘It isn’t really a matter of why, Timothy. Sometimes people have to die.’

Tim opened his mouth to protest. A torrent of thoughts tried to articulate themselves at once, and in their rush, became trapped in the narrow door of his mouth. No sound came out.

‘You will find things much easier if you stop questioning’ the bearded man continued, his expression light and easy. ‘I stopped many, many years ago.’
Tim found his voice, a small, frightened rodent of a voice. ‘I think…I think I would find things a little easier if I knew what he had done.’
‘He has done many things. He has been to school for example. When he was nine years old he was sent home in disgrace for buttering the floor at the top of the library stairs. As a young man he enjoyed racket sports. He once found a wallet containing fifteen pounds and some small change on a beach in Wales. He donates to several charities, for example Friends of the Earth. Also Barnado’s. He has a wife, whom he loves and has remained faithful to. He looks at pornographic websites while she watches Coronation Street. You are trying to see some sort of grand arc to this story, aren’t you? There isn’t one. A series of more or less related actions and events is the best that can be hoped for. The odd accident. Some little planning.’
‘Are you insane? I don’t mean, “What has he done throughout his life?” What the hell has he done to deserve death?’
‘Nothing, particularly. As I said, I receive instructions and I prefer not to question them.’ The bearded man looked over to where Lang sat. Tim followed his gaze. Lang and his friend were playing dice, betting for notes. ‘My predecessor had a taste for the declamatory. “Life is a carnival of accidents” he liked to tell me, “And the revellers are quite, quite blind.” He sounded better when he said it. It was the accent, I think.’

Timothy Clarke sank to the pavement, his head in his hands. He felt his sore heel rub against the inside of his shoe, exposed to the leather where his sock had worn right through. He felt the damp of the pavement seeping through the seat of his trousers. He turned his head to look up at the bearded man, and found the white face and its pickled walnut-eyes much closer than he had expected.
‘And why am I supposed to help you? What does it have to do with me?’ he spat at the looming face.
‘For a start, I cannot act directly. That is one of the conditions under which I must work. And since my two helpers are now being peeled out of their cars, I need you. Bad luck for you, Timothy. Bad luck that your route home was obstructed by my crash. Bad luck that Lang left his office twenty minutes early tonight. What could that mean? Nothing, I imagine.’
‘If I refuse?’
‘You will die. It will be a terrible, meaningless shame.’

*

Fifteen minutes later, Tim was waiting in the alley behind the King James. He had a bright, sharp knife tucked up the sleeve of his jacket. His face was as white as the bearded man’s, and his teeth were grinding together. He watched as the side door opened and the familiar warm light glanced out in a beam that expanded and then shrank back. He waited in the shadows behind the large green bins until he could clearly see the figure that approached. He held his breath for a second, then lunged.

*

By midnight, he was walking with the bearded man along the Victoria Embankment. The tide was low and the gritty gums of the river were visible. They had disposed of the knife in the river and left Lang’s body to be found in the alleyway. Tim’s eyes were sore from crying. How could this happen? he asked himself over and over. A cracked voice answered inside his head.

-You have suffered from asthma since you were a boy. Your first girlfriend found it hard to talk about her needs. At the age of twenty-three you got a job as a marketing assistant. When you are alone you pull at the hairs that have begun to protrude from your nostrils. You briefly considered becoming vegetarian but decided you didn’t have the willpower. You were mistaken for a man named Oskar Lang one evening in Soho.

CASSETTE

By Ben

The sun is coming up bloody and undercooked.

A second before she jerks awake, she feels the sensation of plummeting. There’s no sense of surprise anymore when she feels the tape cassette under her pillow. She thinks of the tooth fairy and their reliable contract. Fifty pence per tooth. No questions asked. Exchanges carried out under cover of darkness. She thinks of the ivory trade. She wonders what she is giving in exchange for these cassettes.

The first one arrived a week ago. Now she has three. She is going to play the first two, and then the new one. She can feel a lead bird nesting in the pit of her stomach. She starts the first cassette and as the tape picks up the slack and starts to reel forward, she feels the bird laying a lead egg in its nest.

Hissing tape.
The crunch of ice underfoot.
Under hoof.
The breath of an animal.
Hoof steps fading gradually.
The wind in pine branches.
In the distance, the rough bleating of a goat.
Click.

She remembers that dream. A black billy goat appeared out of the forest with moonlight caught in the fog of his breath. Walking past her like a matted, reeking ghost, it had turned its yellow eyes towards her for a second. She waited for a long time, watching the moon carve a path behind the shivering pines. She realised she was alone. She had woken feeling as though she had been given a warning.

She loads the second tape. Three days had passed between the arrival of the first tape, and this one. She played it once, the morning it had arrived. She plays it now for the second time. It is less clear, the sounds more jumbled and chaotic, than the first tape.

Barking, wild.
The splash of water.
Laughter.
A tangle of noise, splintering wood, louder barks.
Underneath, the scuffling of feet and paws on dusty ground.
Click.

The sounds are hazy, but her memory is as clear and sharp as a splinter of glass. It is a dream that has followed her for years. Even without the tape, without the dream, she still has the images of that day acid-etched into her thoughts. A summer day when the sun was heavy on their shoulders. The grass in their garden had dried and turned to yellow dust weeks ago. Her baby brother playing in the paddling pool while she kept watch. The pack of dogs that carried him away before she had time even to scream. The slow spread of water from the pool, seeping darkly into the parched ground.
Third tape. The new one. She turns towards the window where the sun is still low and red, and a light breeze is breathing the curtains back and forth. She loads the tape.

The deep growl of trucks.
Rain pats down on hot tarmac.
A tiny bird sings.