Manners Page 6

  Two lines, dainty creases like the palm's own fortune lines beneath the buttock. The converging crease-lines in the baby flesh led my mesmerized, smoothing hand like gravity towards the meat of the vagina. My stomach lurched as I pulled back my arm and whacked her milky buttocks.

  The most vital decision I ever made?

  She gives a little gasp, like an innocent pre-pubescent in a children's home. That's her game. But what's mine? Again I spank her. Little 'innocent' gasps, as if I'm totally in control and she doesn't know what these things happening to her are. But she's deep, deep into the dance. A dance she is an intimate of, and me just a neophyte. Her being totally into it helps me lose myself too. I spank her again, and then again. I feel sick, faint and light-headed but impelled. On, on. Her bottom now is red, but the marks look more like grazes than blotches, it looks more like abrasion than impact wounds.

  'In such cases an officer should look for "star—pattern" bruising on the child, corresponding to the five fingers of the suspect adult's hand or fist.'

  This is just a play zone to her, but to me it's like a psychodrama session gone terribly wrong, botched by the bogus group-leader with sham certificate on the wall. The bruises shade from red to mauve as the abandon becomes real violence.

  It's been a law with me always to know what I'm going to do next, and now here I am, not knowing what I'm going to do next. Like a strobe or jump-cut filming I find myself with a fistful of orange hair in my hand — FLASH — and her head jerked back — FLASH — find myself whacking her inside thigh — FLASH — find myself slapping a hanging breast — FLASH — FLASH.

  Yet still one part of me holding on to restraint. Again like a strobe: recurring interventions or islands of normal vision. Yes, I know what I'm doing, I know it's a game. Yes, I know what I'm doing, I know it's a game.

  Resentment fuels me. There she is having thrown off responsibility and rediscovered a child-like absence from self-determination. But for me abandonment means to be abandoned to all the ogrish adult nastiness.

  So important to me all my life not to hate women. It's been such a fundamental article of the Manners constitution that I don't hate women. And yet here it is. Here is the hatred of women. Here is the resentment of enslavement to arse and tit — as I slap her full breast and she yelps.

  Pandora's box.

  I'd never been able to do this before. Maybe because I'd never been this close to someone. You've got to really love someone before you thrash the arse off them. I punch her arse and feel the scallop bone beneath. A different howl from her this time. Her noises were like she had just put herself in perdition. Liar!

  'You know what you're fucking doing, you bitch, you fucking deceitful bitch!!!' She moans at this which makes me even more furious. It's easy for you, you don't know what this means to me. I smack her arse and the backs of her legs hard and unleashed as the blows will land. She yelps differently now. 'You fucking two-faced lying WHORE!!!'

  I flip her over from her knees to her back, pausing only to mutter, 'Put me inside you.' I stare down at her vagina. What power in her swamp thing, controlling everything. A salivating fury to get inside her, the johnny half masted at full stretch with the raging bloodstorm. Inside her and still urgent. I slap her face and come on hearing the Dolby thwack of palm on hollow cheek. The first time I've ever hit a woman. As I melt what else has melted inside me? What strange death have I died? What new life am I prone and naked to suffer entry from?

  As soon as I came I felt ill and scared. Before the blow landed there was knowledge, telepathic knowledge, that this was what she wanted me to do. I was sure of it. From the rummage-sale of her clothes she asked me: 'Why do you always ask me to put you inside?'

  'So there's no doubt in a court of law!'

  For a beat she winced. She looked as if she was about to cry but then rolled over on to her side, away from me, roaring with laughter. A strange, grossed-out laughter, though. She paused in her raucous cackle, thought about it, looked at me, gave another groan and started all over again.

  I went out to the late-night shop. My head had blown a gasket. How could life still be the same out here? How could life continue the same?

  There I was in the corner shop, passing copper and silver coins to a chubby young Sudanese man. Maybe he knew about all this stuff too, but it didn't unhinge him.

  Back at the flat we sat side by side on the floor leaning against the bed, like two innocent children. I found, however, that I couldn't eat anything shiny or smooth. An apple was too much like flesh. I felt too dissolved in flesh, insubstantial. Crisps were good. Unflesh-like. I got to my feet and found relief in touching a crumbly bit of flaky plaster on the wall and the dry, abrasive breeze-block beneath.

  'What are you doing?' she asked.

  'Stroking the wall.'

  'Oh, well, that's all right, then.'

  We sat at the table. She'd put on a greying, crumpled Bundeswehr vest of mine, but I still felt oppressed by the freedom of her flesh, the unbound white mound where breast met armpit in creases, by her loose breasts swaying perilously. If only I could tell her to get dressed, to cover up. I opened the back door to make it colder but the night was warm.

  Always been a 'no means no' hardliner. But here 'no' meant 'yes'. This was all beyond what I could talk about, so instead I played a game. With a polite, straightforward smile I gripped her naked upper arm and inched my fuming cigarette towards the flesh.

  'No,' she said, leaning away, with a questioning smile.

  'No?' I asked.

  'No!' she said. Her grin now was half 'of course not' and half 'you're mad'.

  I tapped the side of my nose and said in the plodding voice of an old, bar-stool cockney: 'I understand the game … ' I pushed the cigarette towards the flesh again, nodding my wiseacre head.

  'Get off!' she squealed, startled, clasping my fag arm and holding it off.

  'OK "Get off", yeah, I understand the game! Heh-heh, I got yer drift,' said the geezer as I pretended still to try and burn her arm. 'I understand the game.' I gripped her for another second before letting her go, peacefully puffing away, still in character.

  'You're mad,' she said, but her face was smiling so that meant everything was OK. Yeah, it meant everything was fine.

  Melt

  'You're mad.' My stomach is melting lead. I get up to put the kettle on. There is a musty smell of something dead in the fridge even with the door closed. 'You're mad.' I fix a coffee and sit back in the chair hoping to have shaken off the next memory which is coming: the counsellor. No matter what happens tomorrow I'm never going to see the counsellor again. I can't go back there because of something she said to me, once, a few months before I'd killed anyone, when I went to see her about something disturbing I saw just after tea-time on a cool, light summer's evening …

  Kieran was looking as vexed as he ever looked which wasn't much. He's got one of those patient faces where the natural settling point is sunny. A V-shaped top lip. A face both laid back and alert. Slightly thinning, sandy, light-brown hair, a touch of grey here and there. But he was frustrated by this slow Thursday. Every call out we responded to there'd already be about two other patrol cars and an LDV on the scene! Walking back to the mauve, unmarked Astra Kieran said, 'Where's the breakdown of society when you need it? I should've stayed at Stoke Newington.'

  'Yeah?'

  'Oh, it was brilliant.'

  'Why was that?' I asked.

  He shook his head with slow admiration. 'The quality of crime.'

  'How do you mean?' I asked.

  'Oh, every night: two rapes, a murder, shootings … he reminisced.

  Back in the car we asked Control for anything. Colin Weaver, the Control jockey, read off a complaint from someone on the Derwent Estate about a brown stain on the ceiling that had started dripping gunk into theirs. No response from the upstairs flat.

  'Sold!' Kieran told him. 'Over.'

  Derwent Estate is red-brick 1950s deck-access flats. We banged on the door, peered through
mesh-window into the kitchen.

  We both took turns trying to kick the door down and fell about laughing when neither of us could.

  Kieran held a finger aloft in a cartoonish, lightbulb-above-the-head gesture. 'Fortunately,' he explained, 'the local community are on hand to help the police.' We left the estate, marched across a few streets to Marlborough Road and rang a bell that said Flat D.

  'Who lives here?' I asked.

  'A thief.'

  A window opened above us. A skinny girl with long ginger hair in a centreparting leant out in a very baggy T-shirt. I was wondering whether I'd be able to see the white sides of her breasts through the hanging armpit of the outsize T-shirt sleeve. (And I'm getting paid by the government!) 'Hiya, I'd like to talk to Mr Collins, please.'

  'I haven't seen him myself for a few days. I'll tell him when I see him.'

  'Well have a look in the living-room,' Kieran called up to her, 'perhaps around the sofa area. He's probably there.' She paused. And that was it. That pause was all we needed to see, and she knew it. She withdrew her head out of the up-and-over window, dark glass where it was tilted away from the light. Collins stuck his head out where his girlfriend's had been. A young man with black hair.

  'Hello,' said Kieran.

  'Hi,' he replied. Kieran banged and rubbed his hands once. 'Don't worry, I'm not gonna come in. Can you bring down a crowbar or something? I've got to get into a flat.'

  'I've given it up.'

  'Yeah, well if you've sold the tools I'm gonna wanna know who you sold them to, and if you haven't they'll still be there.' He pulled his head in. Kieran turned to me and said in a quieter, more sardonic voice, as if he was talking to Collins, ' … you know, at the back of an old cupboard somewhere.' We waited while they tidied up the roaches or whatever they needed to do in case we asked to come in after all. Kieran was just ringing the bell again after five minutes when Collins came down. He was in grey jogging pants, barefoot and stripped to the waist, with an ordinary screwdriver and a wry grin.

  'This is all I've got.'

  'Oh yeah?'

  'This'll do.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Yeah,' he said, grinning for an instant then biting his lip. 'It's not as easy as you make it look,' said Kieran. Collins didn't say anything so Kieran then asked, 'What do I do?'

  'I wouldn't know.'

  'Do you just put it — ' Kieran held the screwdriver in both hands and mimed sliding it between the lock and the frame, 'and then just click the lock up?'

  'Is there a mortise?'

  'No,' I said.

  'It's the other side,' he said.

  'Eh?'

  'Hinges.'

  'Excellent! I'll bring it straight back.'

  'Ta.'

  'Thank you.'

  'OK.'

  *

  The hinges were a palaver but in the end we jimmied them just like Collins had mimed.

  The suffocating flat stank of rancid milk. Black, rotten fruit smeared and powdered a glass bowl shaped like a leaf. Flies and bigger insects with see-through wings were zipping audibly around.

  'Hello?' I called out as we walked through the flat. I opened the bedroom door and against mouth-stuffing heat said, 'Oh Jesus.'

  An old lady lay dead in bed. I noticed the red light of her electric blanket in the curtained gloom. I should have thought before I lifted the electric blanket off her body. Failure to stop at a red light. Dead for a fortnight maybe more with the electric blanket on. The blanket lay strangely sunk here and there and was wet to the touch. There was a sucking sound when I peeled back the gooey blanket. I screwed my eyes and turned my head away at the risen stench, then looked back down at the old, dead woman.

  She'd died in her sleep, alone. The electric blanket set to MAX for a fortnight in the sealed and sweaty room had melted all her body fat. The fat had sagged through the soggy mattress, the dripping had strained through the mesh of the bed base's hessian underlay on to the floor, coalesced into a pool of off-white gunk on the thin carpet, glooped heavy, stained and sunk through to the ceiling below.

  The nightie was halfway inside the goo where her stomach had been, resting now on her slippery spinal cord.

  'Oh God,' said Kieran, kissing his Irish-Catholic fingertips and closing her eyes. He placed his hand a second on the dry land of her forehead.

  We called up the ambulance and went and stuck our heads out the window. I lit a Camel and looked out at a steep muddy slide of earth, a copse of trees and a gaping black vinyl chain-link fence. When the bifta was halfway down, Kieran asked, 'What shall we tell 'em it is downstairs?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well we should just say a burst pipe or something.'

  'Fuck that.'

  'You don't want to gross them out. They've got to live there.'

  'No way! That old lady was their neighbour. You'd think they might've popped up and said, "Sorry to bother you, but we just thought we'd check you're all right seeing as how your body fat has started dripping through the ceiling."'

  'Do you know who your neighbours are?'

  'No.'

  'Well then.'

  'That's not the point,' I said.

  'Yes, it is.'

  'It's not.'

  'What is the point then?'

  'What's the point?'

  'Yeah.'

  'The point is,' I shouted, flicking dog-end out the window and drawing myself up to my full height, 'that's my nan!'

  We pissed ourselves, Kieran sliding down the radiator, while I had to put my head on the top of the telly. We laughed like how you used to laugh at school, ab-crunching, face-aching attacks of the giggles at the back of double-maths. We fell quiet eventually, then I heard Kieran's breath catch and we were off again. We sighed to a stop. Kieran cleared his throat — ahem ahem — and we were off again. 'Oh dear,' I kept saying, drying my eyes. 'Oh dear. Oh dear.'

  Eventually the thing that sobered me up was how much of the diseased air of the flat I was sucking in with all this wheezing. Even so when the ambulance men came me and Kieran were grim-faced and not looking at each other for fear of laughing. It must have looked like we were guilty.

  You can never tell what's gonna upset you. With every officer it's different. Some officers get very upset at traffic accidents. But this has never bothered me. Well not on that level where it really gets under your skin. But this did.

  Beverley came round that night and I couldn't have sex with her.

  'Are you seeing another woman?' she casually enquired.

  'Yes.'

  *

  About a week later me and Kieran were on home beat down the Holloway Road. I'd say Kieran has a better mind than me. For a start he's a DC — only plodding with a street-officer because of Two Year Tenure (two years after promotion CID such as him have to go back on the beat for a year, sometimes two). He doesn't however like to get abstract or theoretical — though I wish he would because he has stronger analytical powers than me. This difference between us has evolved into a particular convention … We'll be walking along on home beat or whatever and I'll wonder aloud something like, I dunno, how, say, racism slips into your thinking unawares. And he'll go, 'Yes … ' only he'll say it sarcastically, mock-thoughtfully, piss-takingly, over-interested like: 'hmmm, fascinating … ' (I sometimes think that Kieran's ironic 'yes … ' is because he doesn't think I'm as academically detached as my tone of voice. But maybe I'm reading too much into it.) Kieran as he often did was getting on my case about my stately pace. 'Do you think you could you walk a bit slower?' he said in the crowded daytime high street.

  'I'm going further than you,' I replied. 'My journey is longer.

  More is required of me. I'm pacing myself as I walk a closer walk with Jesus.'

  'It's my arse, isn't it?'

  'Yes, it's your buns of steel. I'm mesmerized by your arse. I can't take my eyes off it. I've no idea what's happening in the street. There could be a murder happening but — would I know?'

  'Would you care?' />
  'Only if you had to run across the road and a lorry temporarily obscured your pert buttocks from me. Then I'd just stand on the pavement and cry.'

  'Well in that case you can walk as slow as you like.'

  'No, it's OK, I'll step it up,' I said. I caught up with him and after we'd walked for a bit asked, 'Don't you feel inundated with sheer evil and ugliness sometimes so that the whole world seems tawdry and squalid?'

  'Yes … ' he said, but he was only half-hearted in honouring the catch-phrase. His next words showed that he knew what I was talking about and that he'd been thinking about it too. 'I wouldn't say the old lady being in that … state was evil, though.'

  'No, all right, but just how that life can be so … you know — '

  'We've got a rule now — me and Becca — that I'll always tell her about stuff on the job … but I broke it with this.'

  'You didn't tell her about … '

  'The old lady. No,' said Kieran.

  'No,' I said.

  'Miss Wet T-shirt.'

  'You are a cunt! You are a cunt! I'm saying that not in passion, just a clear statement of objective fact. You. Are. A. Cunt! And I want you to remember when your children are on your knee saying, "Oh we love you Daddy," that you are a cunt. That is the absolutely central and fundamental part of your character and who you are. It's that you are a fucking cunt. You cunt!'

  Kieran laughed a little, but was more puzzled at how cross I was.

  'Sorry, I'm sorry,' he said, 'but you wanna take it all on. You can't let it stay in your system. You want to dwell on it — '

  'I don't want — '

  '— for some reason of your own.'

  *

  I needed to talk to someone about the melted old woman. I had a word with Mickey. 'You should go an' 'ave a bit of cahncelling,' he suggested. Yes, I thought, I could do with some of that cancelling. There's still a bit of a macho thing about it though. Not as bad as it was but it's still there. And what with me being known as a university graduate my Plimsoll-line of ponciness is always bobbing under the briny (however much I like to identify with footballers like Graeme Le Saux or Pat Nevin with their degrees and Joy Division records). There's the macho thing plus 'will-this-fuck-up-promotion?' So I said no.