She was different to the rest and she reminded him of someone else, a face in an old photograph. But it was only the image that he remembered. He couldn’t remember the person. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t bring back the touch or the soft breath. Oh, he fantasized of course, built a character around the picture. But he never knew her.
But who was this? This nudge to the past? She might have been a student. Or a tom. No difference from a distance. Not to look at. It was only closer you saw the hardness about the tom. But there was something uninhibited about the way this one moved – free and easy with an adventurous touch, the perfume of the campus – and he did love students. He appreciated intelligence even though he knew that most students didn’t have any. But it didn’t matter for these students with their dreams of better things handled the situation and their fear so much better than their elders – until they realized the inevitable – and then they could appreciate him for what he was: a predator, a jungle cat, a lover. His courtship was the pursuit itself, the hunt, the stalk, his phallus the red-hot blade. Swish, swish, said the blade. He loved the whimper when they saw their own skin parting to reveal the deep pink flesh – pink, before it turned to red.
He never knew them and that was part of the thrill, reading about them afterwards, the write-ups in the papers, the lives they’d lived and their indiscretions accompanying the photographs of them in bikinis taken on their last holidays on tropical beaches. The newspapers loved bikinis, and tits, if they could get them.
The screamers were the worst. You sorted them out quickly. Go for the neck to stop them screaming and you’d get covered in blood. No good at all. Just cut it short. Make them know. Take their tits away. It’s mostly fat and no blood, no blood to splatter anyway. Do your business and get out of it.
The wetters were a nuisance. You could end up getting wet. They wet themselves at the sight of the knife, after he’d used it just once, before he used it again.
Then the talkers, trying to talk their way out of it even while their blood splashed down.
Then the kickers, the evening class karate and Kung Fu experts with their coloured belts. Pretty useless, that stuff, unless you knew the danger. And no one ever knew, until they felt the blade.
He watched her and he wondered what she’d be: screamer, wetter, talker, freezer? He watched her move toward the underpass, struggling with the case.
He ran across the road, dodging traffic and red lights, and entered the underpass from the other end. Dangerous places, underpasses, where the lighting isn’t good. Lonely places, underpasses, where the helpless leave their blood.
As he went down the steps he heard the click-clicking of her shoes on the tiled floor. The tunnel was an amplifier. As he appeared she seemed to recognize him, just for an instant, but it was there, in her eyes. Perhaps she’d seen him before. Perhaps she’d clocked him on the pavements, while he was clocking her.
She was midway along the underpass as he drew level. He threw her a smile of acknowledgement but it met with no response. He’d got her wrong. This was no student. This was a hard bitch. There was a yard between them, no more than that, just a single step, a quick, sudden step.
He made his move.
She dropped the case, ready for it.
Swish, swish, said the blade, with the deftness of a surgeon’s scalpel, into the breast. In, out, then swish again, right across the chest. But she didn’t struggle, or grimace, or scream. She just stood there smiling like some mental retard on the steps of the European Parliament. And from the neat cut in her figure-hugging rich-blue dress a thick wad of tissue bloomed like a white rose.
The first guest to arrive said, “Fuck!” And then he saw the hammer. A simple hammer with a long wooden shaft with a steel head smudged in red. He was transfixed, watched it move towards him, all the way to his head, wondering in that instant, where the red had come from. Phut!
A dull thud.
And then darkness.
And then some vague light again, filtering in through a swirling mist.
He felt that warm sticky feeling, no pain, not yet. Just a burning sensation that grew steadily hotter. But he knew what had happened. He couldn’t believe it. His eyes bulged in disbelief. The bitch had hit him, taken him by surprise and for a moment or two he’d been out of it. But now…now she was using his own knife on him. And she was talking, in two voices. One sounded like a woman. But the other very definitely did not.
In the whole of the city, out of everyone in the world he could have chosen, he’d come up with his own personal A-One fucking moon-worshipper.
“Try it on me, would you? Try it on Paula? Forgot my minder, did you? Bad move. Weak move. Not a book move.”
And the first guest felt helpless as the woman pulled the black jacket from his shoulders.
He heard Paula say, “Niiice jacket.”
And then the male voice came again, out of those same full red lips. “You keep it, sweetheart. Call it a trophy. Like a tiger skin or something. Like we’ve just bagged a tiger and skinned it, in…in Africa.”
It was all so fucking disconcerting.
And the first guest watched the stain spread out in slow motion, still not believing. He watched the blade come down again and felt a slash across his cheek. There was something strangely intimate here. He felt his flesh opening, cleanly, quickly, deeply, but it felt just like a sting, like a burn. But there was blood everywhere.
“Try to hurt my Paula, eh? Eh? Bad mistake, innit?”
“Let’s go. We haven’t got time for this. Mr Lawrence will be waiting.”
“Look away, girl. Won’t be a mo’. Like Powder Pete said, see? Gotta make sure these bastards don’t do it again. He looks after the kids, don’t he? See? I’ll look after the girls. No one else, is there?” With each swish of the blade a soft and gentle sigh emerged from the first guest’s lips. He lay there, oozing and spurting.
She was cutting the straps of his dress, the bitch, pulling the flimsy material down over his flat chest and laughing while she lifted the lace bra, A-cup, 34. He was helpless, his arms and legs jerking on the cold stone. One of his size 7 black sandals with its three-inch heel flew off and bounced from the curved tiled wall close to where an artist had expressed himself with PK loves JL.
Then she was lifting the hem of the shantung fabric, exposing the lace briefs that were the colour of his lipstick.
“What are you, anyway? That’s not what you’d call your average snatch, no way. Here, Paula, look at this, will you?”
“Gosh, now that is a surprise!”
He felt the knife again, in and out of him, but now in dangerous places, liver, kidneys, stomach, struggling and rooting between ribs to get at his heart. He knew he was dying, filleted, a pig on a butcher’s slab, flesh opened up, blood pumping, red fountains in the stagnant piss-filled air. But it was all so painless. Even the slash across his penis, and the feel of blood across his legs, left him strangely disconnected.
He wasn’t screaming here. He was no screamer.
And he wasn’t wetting. He was no wetter.
And the girl, if that’s what she was and who the hell could tell nowadays, cleaned herself up with some of his shantung fabric and struggled into the black Paul Smith jacket and covered the tear in her dress where the bulging wad of white tissue showed signs of red. And then she simply gathered her case and continued on her way, as though the entire business had been a little interruption, of no consequence at all.
The first guest to arrive at the party had stayed to the end. Wanna Party?
Wanna come?
He remembered the invitation and drew in a final breath of piss-filled air and smiled as the joke sank in.
Chapter 34