Ritual

45

Mossy lies on his back, tears running down his face. The room is still now. At last it has stopped its rolling, its thumping like a giant heart, and he's grateful at least for that. He takes a few breaths. It's daytime and on the other side of the grille, very close, a car's just pulled up. Maybe it's the others coming back because the place has been empty for hours. They've left him here with the locked gate, Will Smith looking at him impassively over his rocket-launcher and Brad Pitt frowning, the sun glinting off his breastplate.

It's the first time in what seems like a lifetime that the pain has gone down to a level where he can concentrate, to think about his situation. He's no idea how long it's been since Uncle took his hands. Lately time's been slipping all over the place, he's been in a fever, he knows that, and somewhere in the fever he's lost track of who he is and where he's located in the world. He closes his eyes and tries to think his way back, but all he can remember are the first few hours when he came round from the drug.

It was like being hurtled into a white wall, or taken into space and set spinning with no sense of up or down. It was a pain like nothing he'd experienced, worse than the agonies, worse than the ulceration he'd had on his leg at Christmas. He lay on the sofa and howled, his arms clamped between his legs, the inside seam of his jeans pressed hard on the wounds as if that might stop the agony. He didn't dare look at what they'd done to him.

Skinny sat with him, trying to keep him calm, giving him a hit regularly, using his hard little fingers deftly and pushing the needle gently through the skin, always taking time to find a place that wasn't already broken. It was only on the second day, when he'd screamed just about all he could, that Mossy got up the courage to look. He waited until Skinny had given him a hit and, gulping hard because he thought he'd puke, he did it. He looked at the place his hands had been. He held his arms up. His head went dead for a moment, wouldn't move, and all he could do was stare. His first thought, when it came, was ridiculous and surreal: it was how short his arms were. Someone had wrapped the stumps in bandages, the sort you could get from a first-aid kit. They were thick and crusty with blood and fluids and had been taped secure with lots of ordinary Elastoplast, all with black gum round the peeling edges. Shaking so hard his teeth were chattering, he laid the stumps on his thighs and stared at them for a long, long time thinking how fucking short his arms were. He kept coming back to that — that his arms were tiny. He wondered how he'd never thought to notice this — or to notice how big or small his hands were.

And then it hit him, a dead weight slamming him in the chest. He'd seen them every day of his life but he couldn't remember what his hands were like. He'd never see them again. His own fucking hands and he'd never look at them again. He dropped his head back on the sofa.

'You fucking bastards,' he screamed. 'Give me back my hands.' Tears rolled down his cheeks. Skinny crawled across the floor and knelt next to him, stroking his forehead, but there was a howling hole of sadness at Mossy's centre that couldn't be smoothed away. 'My hands. My hands. Mine. They're my fucking hands.'

And it is this he keeps coming back to. They are my fucking hands. Over the last few days, while the pain has lessened, while Skinny has changed the dressings in the best way he knows how, Mossy's just kept up the rage that someone's dared to take something of his own away from him, that if he could just see them he'd be able to do something about it, reverse it maybe. He is more jealous of his hands than of anything he's ever owned. There's no boyfriend, no gear, nothing he could ever have felt this way about. They are something no one could replace — something his parents gave him, and this thought makes him cry even more. That his parents gave him something precious. He hasn't given a toss about his parents for years, but now he can't stop thinking of their sadness if they find out his hands have been taken from him. His capacity to feel something about Mum and Dad makes him wonder how he ever ended up a scag-fag like this.

A smell has started to come from the wounds. Three days ago, when he was trying to turn over on the sofa, he felt something inside the bandages on his left stump give with an unzippering sound that made him want to puke. A thick, milky fluid leaked into the bandages. Within a few hours the fever set in and Mossy was taken away again to another world, a world of pain where his body was nothing more than a giant pulse. For days he sweated and thrashed on the sofa, getting brief moments of clarity, the Men in Black staring down at him. Sometimes the poster read, Protecting Scum From the World and sometimes it read, Get the Fuck Out of the Universe, Mallows, YOU Scum. Whenever the world stopped turning, he screamed about his hands, rolling sideways on the sofa and yelling into the dark grille, Give me back my fucking hands, you cunts.

And now his strength is gone. His body has given up and all he can do is lie there, breathing weakly, and listen to the empty building creaking around him. It's easy to pretend that none of this has happened, that he never went to that counselling session, that he never met Skinny, and thinking about what it was like before it all went wrong makes his heart feel like it's cracking. Now that he's thinking straight he knows the truth. There's no going back. He's going to die here. He lets the voices come into his head, lets the few weak rays of sunlight come into his eyes and he knows it's the last sunshine he'll see.

And then, outside, behind the grille where the sunlight is and trees are green, the car's engine cuts and a door slams.