"You've got to come and see them."
"I—"
"Tonight. And pick up the Bentham at the same time."
"Thanks."
"I've got a house for myself these days. Round the corner from the Maternity Hospital, in Pilgrim Street. Number sixty-four. Some time after nine?"
"Right. Thanks. Pilgrim Street." Quaid nodded.
"I didn't know there were any habitable houses in Pilgrim Street."
"Number sixty-four."
Pilgrim Street was on its knees. Most of the houses were already rubble. A few were in the process of being knocked down. Their inside walls were unnaturally exposed; pink and pale green wallpapers, fireplaces on upper storeys hanging over chasms of smoking brick. Stairs leading from nowhere to nowhere, and back again.
Number sixty-four stood on its own. The houses in the terrace to either side had been demolished and bull-dozed away, leaving a desert of impacted brick-dust which a few hardy, and fool-hardy, weeds had tried to populate.
A three-legged white dog was patrolling its territory along the side of sixty-four, leaving little piss-marks at regular intervals as signs of its ownership.
Quaid's house, though scarcely palatial, was more welcoming than the surrounding wasteland.
They drank some bad red wine together, which Steve had brought with him, and they smoked some grass. Quaid was far more mellow than Steve had ever seen him before, quite happy to talk trivia instead of dread; laughing occasionally; even telling a dirty joke. The interior of the house was bare to the point of being spartan. No pictures on the walls; no decoration of any kind. Quaid's books, and there were literally hundreds of them, were piled on the floor in no particular sequence that Steve could make out. The kitchen and bathroom were primitive. The whole atmosphere was almost monastic.
After a couple of easy hours, Steve's curiosity got the better of him.
"Where's the holiday snaps, then?" he said, aware that he was slurring his words a little, and no longer giving a shit.
"Oh yes. My experiment."
"Experiment?"
"Tell you the truth, Steve, I'm not so sure I should show them to you."
"Why not?"
"I'm into serious stuff, Steve."
"And I'm not ready for serious stuff, is that what you're saying?"
Steve could feel Quaid's technique working on him, even though it was transparently obvious what he was doing.
"I didn't say you weren't ready—"
"What the hell is this stuff?"
"Pictures."
"Of?"
"You remember Cheryl."
Pictures of Cheryl. Ha. "How could I forget?"
"She won't be coming back this term."
"Oh."
"She had a revelation." Quaid's stare was basilisk-like.
"What do you mean?"
"She was always so calm, wasn't she?" Quaid was talking about her as though she were dead. "Calm, cool and collected."
"Yes, I suppose she was."
"Poor bitch. All she wanted was a good fuck."
Steve smirked like a kid at Quaid's dirty talk. It was a little shocking; like seeing teacher with his dick hanging out of his trousers.
"She spent some of the vacation here."
"Here?"
"In this house."
"You like her then?"
"She's an ignorant cow. She's pretentious, She's weak, She's stupid. But she wouldn't give, she wouldn't give a fucking thing."
"You mean she wouldn't screw?"
"Oh no, she'd strip off her knickers soon as look at you. It was her fears she wouldn't give—"
Same old song.
"But I persuaded her, in the fullness of time."
Quaid pulled out a box from behind a pile of philosophy books. In it was a sheaf of black and white photographs, blown up to twice postcard size. He passed the first one of the series over to Steve.
"I locked her away you see, Steve." Quaid was as unemotional as a newsreader. "To see if I could needle her into showing her dread a little bit."
"What do you mean, locked her away?"
"Upstairs."
Steve felt strange. He could hear his ears singing, very quietly. Bad wine always made his head ring.
"I locked her away upstairs," Quaid said again, "as an experiment. That's why I took this house. No neighbours to hear."
No neighbours to hear what?
Steve looked at the grainy image in his hand.
"Concealed camera," said Quaid, 'she never knew I was photographing her."
Photograph One was of a small, featureless room. A little plain furniture.
"That's the room. Top of the house. Warm. A bit stuffy even. No noise."
No noise.
Quaid proffered Photograph Two.
Same room. Now most of the furniture had been removed. A sleeping bag was laid along one wall. A table. A chair. A bare light bulb.
"That's how I laid it out for her."
"It looks like a cell."
Quaid grunted.
Photograph Three. The same room. On the table a jug of water. In the corner of the room, a bucket, roughly covered with a towel.
"What's the bucket for?"
"She had to piss."
"Yes."
"All amenities provided," said Quaid. "I didn't intend to reduce her to an animal."
Even in his drunken state, Steve took Quaid's inference.
He didn't intend to reduce her to an animal. However.
Photograph Four. On the table, on an unpatterned plate, a slab of meat. A bone sticks out from it.
"Beef," said Quaid.
"But she's a vegetarian."
"So she is. It's slightly salted, well-cooked, good beef." Photograph Five. The same. Cheryl is in the room. The door is closed. She is kicking the door, her foot and fist and face a blur of fury.
"I put her in the room about five in the morning. She was sleeping: I carried her over the threshold myself. Very romantic. She didn't know what the hell was going on."
"You locked her in there?"
"Of course. An experiment."
"She knew nothing about it?"
"We'd talked about dread, you know me. She knew what I wanted to discover. Knew I wanted guinea-pigs. She soon caught on. Once she realized what I was up to she calmed down."
Photograph Six. Cheryl sits in the corner of the room, thinking.
"I think she believed she could out-wait me."
Photograph Seven. Cheryl looks at the leg of beef, glancing at it on the table.
"Nice photo, don't you think? Look at the expression of disgust on her face. She hated even the smell of cooked meat. She wasn't hungry then, of course."
Eight: she sleeps.
Nine: she pisses. Steve felt uncomfortable, watching the girl squatting on the bucket, knickers round her ankles. Tearstains on her face.
Ten: she drinks water from the jug.
Eleven: she sleeps again, back to the room, curled up like a foetus.
"How long has she been in the room?"
"This was only fourteen hours in. She lost orientation as to time very quickly. No light change, you see. Her body-clock was fucked up pretty soon."
"How long was she in here?"
"Till the point was proved."
Twelve: Awake, she cruises the meat on the table, caught surreptitiously glancing down at it.
"This was taken the following morning. I was asleep: the camera just took pictures every quarter hour. Look at her eyes..."
Steve peered more closely at the photograph. There was a certain desperation on Cheryl's face: a haggard, wild look. The way she stared at the beef she could have been trying to hypnotize it.
"She looks sick."
"She's tired, that's all. She slept a lot, as it happened, but it seemed just to make her more exhausted than ever. She doesn't know now if it's day or night. And She's hungry of course. It's been a day and a half. She's more than a little peckish."
Thirteen: she sleeps again, curled into an even tighter ball, as though she wanted to swallow herself.
Fourteen: she drinks more water.