The Stranglers Honeymoon

8

She didn’t go out for three days.

Three nights and three days. She spent exactly seventy-two-and-a-half hours in her room with ridiculously short breaks in order to go to the lavatory. Or to the kitchen to have a drink of water and something to eat. A sandwich. A cup of yoghurt. Or just a lump of bread, there wasn’t much food in the flat — and it was a mystery how all that time, all those endless hours and those absurdly long-drawn-out minutes passed through her consciousness without driving her mad.

Or perhaps she was mad. Afterwards — the moment she emerged into the rain-drenched street at a quarter to twelve on Sunday evening — it felt as if those locked-in days had already passed.

As if they had been and gone without touching her.

She was in her room, her mother in hers. Three small rooms and a kitchen. Moerckstraat. Rain, more rain, and no food in the fridge. A manic-depressive woman and her mad daughter, who had just murdered their shared lover.

No wonder they were not exactly memorable days.

‘I’m ill,’ her mother had said when they bumped into each other on Friday afternoon. Coughed a little, perhaps to prove it.

As if Monica hadn’t known. As if she was an easily fooled idiot on top of everything else.

‘Me too,’ she had answered.

And frightened, she could have added if her mother had looked as if she were interested in listening. Or if she had been a different sort of mother.

And mad. And desperate. And scared to death.

No, perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to say that. Might not even have been able to say it if she had been a member of the best of families.

‘I’m going for a lie-down,’ her mother had said. ‘You should do the same. It’ll pass.’

So, in bed, on her back. Staring at the ceiling or with her eyes closed, it didn’t make any difference. The images came. The same images, the same film. Over and over again in a never-ending stream, until she had the urge to dig her fingers deep down into her eye sockets and dig out those disgusting projectors by the roots and put an end to everything once and for all, and fall down into darkness and silence and eternal merciful rest and forgetfulness. . These images.

Benjamin Kerran.

Standing there in the bathroom, watching her.

Just standing there, while she squatted on the lavatory seat, emptying her bladder, then trying to press out a few more drops while frenetically trying to work out a plan in her head. Frustratedly and desperately she rejected all possibilities even before they came to the surface of her flickering consciousness. He dug his hand down inside his trousers, contemplating her with glazed-over eyes and an increasingly warped smile, then suddenly he whipped his penis out of his flies, in a sort of perverted triumph, and ordered her to give him head while she was still sitting on the lavatory. That gave him extra stimulus, he said. No, he didn’t order her: Benjamin Kerran didn’t order her to do it, the circumstances didn’t need that. This was different. Instead he used the same remarkable blend of entreaty and threat as before, that was sufficient. ‘You wouldn’t want your mother to find out about us, would you?’ he said. ‘Just one more time. It’ll be easy. . Don’t you think we should grant ourselves an enjoyable finish, especially as it started so well?’

And she did what he wanted. Was almost sick as he thrust his penis a long way into her throat, but she was even closer to being sick when she thought of the possibility of biting off his glans penis. Just bite him as hard as she could — would that save her? she wondered. Is that enough to kill a man, biting off his cock? Would one strong bite be enough?

She didn’t know, and didn’t do it anyway. It wasn’t necessary, as at that very moment she caught sight of a pair of scissors lying on a shelf diagonally behind his back: no more planning was necessary, none at all. All that was needed was to remain cool and calculating and wait for the right moment. That was all.

And in the insistent cinema of her memory she watches herself flush the lavatory and stand up. Sees herself both from the outside and the inside — these pictures that are three days old, but nevertheless seem to her to be older than life itself. . She forces him out of her mouth but grasps his penis in her hand instead and tosses him off, just as he has taught her to do during the short and bewitched time they have known each other, and slowly manoeuvres herself into a position behind his back. She holds his stiff cock in her left hand, stretches round from behind his back, meets his green eyes in the bathroom mirror, and out of his line of vision reaches out with her right hand for the scissors, takes hold of them silently and then stabs them into his stomach with one violent thrust. Without a thought in her head.

Sees his face reflected in the mirror, sees it dilating and expressing first genuine surprise for a fraction of a second. The pain. Then nothing.

She feels his virility deflating in her hand, just as quickly as the air gushing out of a balloon.

Sees — and feels — him collapse without a sound, no more than a slight hiss like the flow of air from the one of those balloons, albeit a bigger one. He falls like a felled ox, like a shot beast, onto the blue-green clinker floor with its small goose pimples and false fossils and genuine heating coils, and sticking out just over his right hip are the shiny handle loops of the scissors, like a magic, mythological symbol. The blades have penetrated him as far as they could go, ten centimetres at least, and even as she stands there staring at the body and at her own face in the mirror, she wonders if he is dead. Already dead? Is it so easy? Doesn’t it take any longer than that? Is that all that’s involved?

And she sees — in the unremitting cinema of her memory — how she leaves the bathroom, rushes out of the flat. How she slams the door behind her with a loud bang that echoes in the staircase and hangs in the air until she is outside in the courtyard with its bicycle stands and rubbish shed and elm tree and bench, because it is a sound-film running in the cinema of her memory. And there is another sound lingering in the air: she doesn’t know if it is real or merely an illusion — a hallucination or an audible mirage: just as she slammed the door, perhaps half a second beforehand, did she hear him shout her name?

Monica!

Is that possible? Did she really hear that?

And just look how she is running through the rain. Racing here and there along the dark streets that seem to be rocking and swaying and branching off in hitherto unknown directions, so that she loses all sense of where she is and of the way home. She continues in this manner for at least an hour — perhaps she doesn’t really want to reach home. . She pauses three or four times, leans against walls and tries to throw up: she succeeds on one occasion, but not on the others, and when she staggers into the kitchen in Moerckstraat the clock, the old, everlasting brass mantelpiece clock that she and her father bought at an auction when she was only five, is showing a quarter past eleven and her mother is sitting in the living room gaping at a blue-coloured crime series on the telly, and doesn’t even say hello.

She doesn’t even say hello, nor does she ask where her daughter has been.

And her daughter doesn’t tell her that she has just killed their shared lover. She simply stands there for a while in the doorway of the big room, which is certainly one of the smallest big rooms in the whole of the town, staring at the uncombed back of her mother’s head and the fast-moving, jerky pictures on the television screen. Then she goes into her own room and stays there for three days.

Three nights and three days.

Seventy-two-and-a-half hours.

Then she goes out.

The cafe was called Duisart’s, and was evidently open until three.

It was in one of the alleys between Armastenplejn and Langgraacht: she had never seen it before, but then, this was not her home district. The light was dirty yellow and the premises seemed a bit on the shabby side, but she found a corner where she was hidden away and didn’t have to look at any other of the sparsely distributed customers crouching over small plastic tables with their coffees, drinks and cigarettes. Men, almost exclusively men. Aged between thirty-five and a hundred. On their own or in pairs. An elderly, intoxicated lady with a spotted dog sat in a corner.

She ordered coffee and a glass of cognac: the waiter, with a ponytail, a nose ring and a flower tattooed on one cheek seemed to be wondering how old she might be, then shrugged and came back after less than a minute with the cup and the glass on a tray.

She sipped at the coffee and at the strong drink in the glass. She was not used to drinking alcohol, far from it: but a voice inside her told her that she needed it now. Something strong. Something uncompromising.

She needed to think straight, quite simply. And needed help in order to be able to think straight.

Needed to switch off that worn-out film show that filled her memory, and get to grips with things. Here and now. She emptied her glass in one gulp, and beckoned the waiter to bring her another one.

I have killed somebody, she began.

A man who was my mother’s lover. And my lover.

Who deserved to die. Didn’t deserve to live.

Not any more.

Why? Why did he deserve to die?

Because he had been exploiting them. Herself and her mother and their extraordinary fragility.

My guilt is light, she thought. As light as a feather. I shall be able to bear it, and nobody need know about it. Nobody knows what I have done, nobody knows about Benjamin Kerran and me, it is all and has all been exclusively between me and him, and now it is hidden away in my head, nowhere else. It hurts and chafes and drives me mad, but that is the only place where it exists. And it will pass. . my mother suspects nothing and will not be given any reason to suspect anything; if anybody else finds out about our connection with Benjamin Kerran, there is no reason to link that connection with his death. . My mother, I mean, my mother will not be connected with his death, there is no reason to do so, he has no doubt kept her just as secret as he has kept me, and when they find him nobody will suspect anything. . They’ve probably only met about five or six times in all. . no, there are no clues linking him to my mother or to me. They will look for a murderer, of course, male or female; but it will never occur to anybody to start looking around in a cramped little flat in Moerckstraat with ceilings so low that even a domestic pet would have to crouch down in order to move around, there’s no reason for anybody to search for anything in a place like that. No reason to be afraid, no reason to be scared any more, no reason to. .

The waiter arrived with her new glass and she broke off her train of thought. Just like cutting off a piece of thread that was too long. Paid, and waited until he had gone away. Then emptied the glass into her half-drunk cup of coffee, as she had seen her mother do, and as she remembered her father doing, and tasted the brew. Added a spoonful of sugar, stirred it and tried again. Much better, it almost tasted good, and warmed her up inside. She had never smoked — apart from a few giggly puffs at less than elegant dances when she was in class five or six — but now she suddenly fancied a cigarette to suck at as she sat in this gloomy cafe as the rain poured down outside.

But instead that voice came back to her. The thought of that voice. It burst into her head like a sour-tasting belch — Benjamin Kerran’s cry from the bathroom just before she slammed the door and raced down the stairs.

Monica!

Was it possible? Wasn’t it just her imagination? A hallucinatory cry from beyond the grave?

Or could it be that she really had heard him? That he really had shouted from that warm clinker floor in the bathroom with a pair of scissors stuck ten centimetres into his gut, his cock hanging helplessly like a piece of rag and his trousers crumpled around his ankles?

That he hadn’t died?

That he was still alive, despite everything?

Then, at least: that he was still alive then, at the moment when she left him and rushed out into the night like a terrified madwoman, her brains crushed like a crust of ice by the heavy boot of reality?

Where do all these words come from? she wondered. The heavy boot of reality? Something she had read, presumably. Lonely girls read more books than anybody else in the world, a woman teacher had told a gathering of parents when she was in class four. She wondered what pedagogical value such a disclosure could have; but of course there was little point in wondering about that just now, in sitting there and trying to trace the dodgy origins of her dodgy thoughts. . It was more important to sharpen them, to focus them and introduce a modicum of clarity. Decide what to do next. Was she drunk? Intoxicated already after no more than one-and-a-half glasses? It wasn’t impossible. She hadn’t had much to eat these last three days, next to nothing in fact, and alcohol had a greater effect on people if they had an empty stomach, even she knew that. Even Monica Kammerle knew that — but there was something else she didn’t know, and that was in fact the most important thing in the world for her to know just now.

Was he dead?

Had Benjamin Kerran really died up there in the bathroom? Had she finished him off by stabbing him with a pair of scissors, or had she only wounded him?

Oh hell, she thought, emptying her cup. Bloody hell, I simply don’t know. I’m such a damned useless idiot that I don’t even know if I’ve killed him or not! Idiot, Monica Kammerle, you are just a poor little idiot, and you’ll soon be as mad as your mother and the pair of you will end up in the loony bin. It’s only a matter of time before the pair of you are lying there under yellow blankets, keeping each other company amid the faint smell of fading carnations and badly washed bodies. .

Almost as a confirmation of this last thought, two men at another table burst out laughing.

A crude, wheezing belly laugh as if from an old horror film, accompanied by curses, a thumping of fists on the table and stamping on the floor. She leaned forward and looked at them through an apology of a trellis which should have been covered by some climbing plant or other, but wasn’t and never would be. Saw how one of the men dug into his right ear with the handle of a teaspoon while the other was convulsed by a coughing attack, which brought the fun and games to a full stop.

She checked her watch and stood up. Five minutes past one. Time to go home, no doubt about that. This wasn’t a place for young girls to while away the night at, Duisart’s, definitely not.

Time to find out how things were in the real world.

To snuggle down into bed in Moerckstraat and make plans, in fact.

I’m a pain, she thought when she was out in the alley again. My thoughts keep nagging away at me. I’m drunk. Some people go downhill rapidly. I’m a drunken murderess, even though I’m only sixteen.

And I feel sick — holy shit!

The night air and walking through the cold rain sobered her up, and by the time she returned to Moerckstraat, fear had once again begun to swirl around inside her.

Her mother was sitting in front of the television, where a different blue-coloured crime series was now trundling along with the sound on low. It was half past one. There was a smell of something unpleasant oozing out from the kitchen, but no doubt it was just the slop bucket.

‘What are you watching?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said her mother.

‘Shouldn’t you go to bed now?’

‘I’ve only just woken up,’ said her mother.

‘I see. Well, I’m going to bed now.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Good night.’

‘Mmm.’

She went to the bathroom. Brushed her teeth. She smelled of sweat, but who the hell cared? Looked for a moment or two at the bottles of tablets, but desisted from checking.

What was the point?

When I’m dead I’ll see Dad again, she thought.