Slip of the Knife

THIRTEEN. YEAH

His neighbors were having a party. Back in his drinking days Kevin had been at many Monday night parties himself and knew how joyless they were. They were after-closing-time affairs, dragging through to the cold, damp morning, full of melancholy drinkers chasing a cheap carryout, banding together solely to consume. He remembered ten-hour nights when conversation was an irksome incidental. Badly coordinated women, who had lost their looks to wine and late nights, doing sexy dancing together while dead-eyed men looked on. Music was mortar to plug the silences. He never wanted to go back there. But tonight the occasional howl and whoop through the wall, the guitar music and the grim hubbub sounded warm and friendly.

The pain in his arm and chin were seeping away and, held still as he was, he could feel the certainty that everything was going to be fine pulse through his body.

His stomach disagreed. It convulsed, once, twice, and the grip on his chin tightened.

“Don’t fucking spew. You spew, you swallow, understand?”

He was holding Kevin’s mouth shut, a hard hand pressed tightly under his chin.

It was dark in the room. He’d left the lights off when he dragged Kevin in here and threw him into the armchair. The curtains were open. They were always open: Kevin didn’t mind people across the road looking in if they could be bothered. He could see out now, a couple with their backs to him watching telly in a soft light. A dark room. A man washing his hands at a kitchen sink.

The man had been kneeling on Kevin’s forearm for what felt like hours. He had lost the feeling in his fingers, in his wrist, and his elbow was pressed tight against the leather but it didn’t seem to hurt now. Nothing seemed to hurt now. Even his teeth, even his jaw, which the man had levered open with a chisel before he put the little paper packages into the back of his throat and forced the water in, making him swallow.

Kevin looked up at the steel-rimmed glasses, the orange streetlights from below reflected on the square lenses, and sensed that, of the two of them, his assailant was feeling worse than he was. The man was desperate and afraid. Sweating.

“Spew and you swallow.”

Kevin’s mood had turned as quickly as a loose feather in a high wind. He knew everything would be OK, whereas a moment ago he had felt helpless and trapped.

The heat came first, a burning heat to his face and chest. A veil of sweat slid across his eyes and the music next door was matched and overtaken by his own heartbeat thudding, faster and faster, pushing through his face. He couldn’t see.

Suddenly, his every muscle tightened to its fullest extent and he stood up, the small man sliding off his lap like a napkin. The man grabbed Kevin’s ankles but was powerless against the buzz of strength flooding through Kevin’s every sinew.

Smiling, a ray of all-powerful light himself, Kevin lifted his foot and stamped on his assailant’s hand. He heard the man cry out, curl into a ball at his feet, half under the coffee table, but Kevin didn’t care. It was wonderful not to care. He stamped again, missing him this time but it didn’t matter. He turned to the room. Light was bursting from every surface. The door. He should go to the door and get out.

He took three steps, a colossus striding forth, the cool night air caressing his hot skin, his chest leading the way, his heart bursting forward, pushing him out to the close, where it would be even colder, even better. He imagined his face pressed tight against the cold of the bare stone, absorbing the delicious tingling chill. One of the drunken neighbors shouted “yeah” and Kevin turned back at the living-room doorway, shouting back, his voice touching theirs through the wall.

Yeah.

An absolute communion of voices. Perfect. Something small was scrabbling at his feet, something grabbing, scratching, pulling at his legs, tugging him.

White light, cool light, flooded spontaneously out of the wall at him, glorious, thrilling. He shut his eyes for one second but forgot to open them again.

He was on the floor, on his side, his arm curled into a tight ball under his chin, his whole left side throbbing to the music. His face was wet.

In the sky above him a foot stepped over his head, a body moved, and a sole hovered above his face. Two orange squares of vicious brightness glinted down at him.

Kevin shut his eyes again.

A voice through a wall called to him, tugging him back to grimy rooms, to sticky settees and black Monday night parties full of the dead.

Yeah.