“We need to talk.” Robert held his gaze, refusing to budge even an inch. He remembered the rape, the aftermath, and the promises he and Sarah had made both to each other and to themselves. He was not a victim; he would never be a victim again.
“Well, come on in, loverboy.” Corbeau stepped back and to the side, opening the door wider.
Robert stepped across the threshold, recalling something he had once read about vampires having to be invited in before they can enter a person’s home. “Thank you.”
Corbeau led him along the hallway and to the living room doorway. The wallpaper was scratched and torn, and somebody had spray-painted crude obscenities from floor to ceiling. The living room door had been removed from its frame. The wood around the absent hinges was rough and jagged, as if it had been hacked at by a dull blade.
“We’re decorating, so you’ll have to excuse the mess.” Corbeau led the way into the living room, smiling.
Monica Corbeau was sitting on the sofa, one hand buried in a slit in the cushions and pulling out the padding. She was wearing some kind of housedress, open to the waist, and no underwear. Her breasts hung loose; there were food stains on her skin. She turned to him and smiled, chocolate stains on her teeth and rubbed into her messy hair. “We weren’t expecting visitors,” she said. “If you’d called ahead, we could have dressed up and made a bit of an effort.” She giggled, and kept on tearing the stuffing out of the sofa.
The floor was littered with detritus: fast-food cartons, beer cans, condoms, wooden crates, pages torn from pornographic magazines, and, oddly, cut flowers. The stems of the flowers were dry and brittle, and the petals had been scattered across the grubby carpet in decorative arcs. The room smelled bad, like backed-up sewage pipes.
“What have you done to my house?” Robert stared at the walls. There were brown stains that looked like they might be feces, and when he raised his eyes to examine the ceiling, he saw that wads of dirty toilet paper had been balled up and thrown so that they stuck to the plaster.
The blinds and curtains were drawn, and someone had set fire to the trailing edge of the curtains before extinguishing the flames to create a long charred hem that had left deposits of ash on the floor.
“We’ve been making the place feel more like a home, making our mark, putting our stamp on things.” Corbeau moved toward his supine wife, reached out a hand and grabbed one of her breasts. She giggled again.
Robert realized then that he was truly in the company of beasts: there was no other explanation for these people and the things they did. He cast aside his inbred middle-class liberalism and accepted they were monsters. It felt strange, going against everything he had been taught, to dismiss fellow human beings in this way, but his only hope for survival was to see them for what they were. No excuses; no theories or postulations. They were beasts.
“Why are you doing this to us?” His shoulders slumped, but he knew he had to gain a degree of control. “Just tell me why.”
Corbeau let go of his wife’s breast and walked back toward Robert. His feet crunched on food containers and broken glass. “We’re playing games, now. We’re just beginning.” His voice was quiet, but sounded louder than a jet engine in the stifling silence of the room. “We’re playing funny games.”
Robert looked him in the eye, and reflected there he saw…nothing. No love, no hate, no empathy, no antipathy…nothing but an empty yearning for diversion, the need to be entertained. “But who are you?”
Corbeau stopped in his tracks, spreading his legs apart as if to balance his weight in an unstable world. He put his hands on his hips and leaned back slightly, like a stage actor preparing to bellow his lines at an audience. His face looked odd, as if it didn’t quite fit on his skull.
“Who are we?” He repeated Robert’s question, but with a tone of contempt in his voice. “I’ll tell you who we are. We’re the ones you don’t want to be reminded of. The ones born on forgotten council estates, and who grow up to steal your cars, break into your houses, and rape your wives and your daughters. We’re the ones whose names you never know, but whose faces haunt your CCTV dreams…the ones with steel in our bones and acid in our blood. The mad ones, the bad ones, the glad ones. We’re every lazy middle-class stereotype brought to life.”
His face seemed to grow, to enlarge and inflate, and the light dimmed and flickered around him.
“We are exactly who you don’t want to be, who you’re glad you’re not. We’re the ones who remind you to be good and careful, to do your jobs and pay your taxes and not get bitten on the arse. We’re the flipside, the underside, the nightside. We’re the damned, the damned, the damned…and we’re never going away. We are them; we are They.” His theatrical speech sounded rehearsed, scripted.
When Corbeau stopped speaking, a silence seemed to fill the room, straining the joints in the construction. Robert expected timbers to creak and crack, windows to shatter, bricks to explode under the unbearable pressure of all that ghastly silence. But it did not happen. Instead, Monica Corbeau once more began to giggle.
Nathan Corbeau took the final few steps toward Robert, stopping only when he was right in his face. The man’s breath smelled like dog shit. Robert winced, but stood firm. It was all he could do; put on a show of strength.
“Remember this?” Corbeau slowly raised his hand, and Robert saw he was holding a mobile phone. He twisted his wrist, showing Robert the screen, and the picture upon it. He must have taken the shot from the car last night, outside the bar. It showed Monica on her knees from the side, with her face buried in Robert’s crotch. Her eyes were closed, her cheek bulged, and Robert’s hands were gripping the sides of her head. “She has a good technique, learned from working on her back in backrooms and bedsits, when we were too poor to put food in the babies’ mouths.” Corbeau pressed a button and the still picture began to move. It was not a photograph; it was a film clip.
Robert tore his eyes from the little screen and stared at Corbeau.
“I suppose your wife still has the same number?” Corbeau raised the phone into the air, as if in a form of victory salute, and made a big show of pressing another one of the buttons. “And there it goes, right to her handset. The wonders of technology, eh?”
Realization dawned upon Robert, and the earth trembled beneath him. “No. You haven’t…”
Corbeau nodded. “Oh yes I have.”
What should he do, where could he go? There was no point in running, because the file would already have arrived, and by the time he reached her Sarah would have seen it. This was irreversible; there was nothing he could do to prevent the outcome, or to rewind the tape of the last few minutes. All he could do was hope her capacity for mercy had not left her after the attack, and that he had done enough in all their years of marriage for her to realize how much he loved her, how much she meant to him, despite his many flaws.
“One more thing.” Corbeau, still smiling, turned to face the door that led to the kitchen. “You can bring her out now.”
Robert was frozen. He was a man of ice. What now, what next?
Molly walked through the door, her face dirty with tears. She was sniffling, but quietly, as if she had been ordered to remain silent. Her feet scuffed the carpet and her hands played with the hem of her sweater. She looked small, tiny; a mere baby in a room filled with adults.
There was a boy standing behind her. He looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. On his head was a Burberry baseball cap and he was wearing an ugly tracksuit. Fine stubble shone at his chin, but his cheeks were hairless and marked with old acne scars. Robert was sure this was the boy he had seen Molly with before—the boy she had been secretly spending time with.