‘You didn’t want to get married?’
‘No way.’
‘You don’t need to?’
‘Nope.’
‘Really?’
He looked at me, his face twisted in vicious grimace.
‘I can have a wank,’ he said. ‘Just like you.’
I couldn’t admit to that. I’m a cop.
‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ I bellowed.
‘You’re a man too.’ He laughed. ‘You’re just like me.’
‘Rubbish!’ I’d said it again.‘You been at it long, have you?’
‘Not to begin with.’
‘So when did you start?’
‘The night the cops picked me up off the street,’ he said. ‘That was the first time. Can you imagine how it felt? After they dropped me home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’
I nodded.
‘In the middle of the night I woke with a hard-on. I couldn’t come. I couldn’t dream either. There was just reality. And the reality was, my life was empty. Nothing except for a room, a bed. But the bed wasn’t empty, because my mother was in it … ’ he twitched nervously and fell silent.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘You know what?’
‘I know that you had to share a bed with your mother,’ I said.
He gave an embarrassed laugh.
‘No big deal,’ I said.
‘No big deal? She was my mother. How could I screw my own mother?’ he said.
I stopped. What did he mean?
‘When your mother caught you wanking, it must have been embarrassing,’ I suggested.
‘Yes.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She talked to me.’
‘Just talked.’
‘Yes, talked,’ he shot me a nervous glance. ‘What else would she do?’
‘Tell me exactly what she said.’
‘OK, she didn’t say anything!’ he shouted. ‘She hit me.’
‘Hit you?’
‘Yes, hit.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you what happened. My mother said I was an animal, so she beat me like an animal. And she was right, I am an animal. You’re human, aren’t you? Swap places with me and we’ll see. What if you woke up in the middle of the night, with no one there, only your mum. Only a mother. You might use your mum then.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry, I’m just talking rubbish.’
Now he was saying it. We always say we’re talking rubbish when we’re afraid the truth will come out.
‘We’ve made our enquiries,’ I said.
‘About what?’
‘You know.’
‘What do I know?’ he said. ‘What?’
‘The walls of your house are thin,’ I said.
I’d struck home. He finally crumbled.
‘I couldn’t help it,’ he began. ‘She swore at me. She called it “that stuff”. But what could I do? I had to do it. The worst time was waking up at three in the morning, when everything was dark. In the dark, you’re trapped with your desires. Then the next day she swore at me and beat me. But I’m not a child any more. I hated her.’
‘But why didn’t she resist?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You’d never have been able to beat her up, if she fought back. And she wouldn’t have been left black and blue with bruises.’
‘You can never prove it.’
‘What?’
‘That her body was bruised.’
‘Of course we can,’ I laughed. ‘You only have to look at the autopsy.’
‘You had no right to do that!’ he shouted. ‘She’s my mum!’
He tried to stand up again, but swayed and fell. The guards went to heave him off the floor but he shoved them away. He started crawling out of the room, shouting ‘Where’s my mum? Where’s my mum? You had no right to touch her! You had no right to do an autopsy!’
I ordered another autopsy.
They found traces of his semen in her vagina.
I burst into his cell and thrust the results at him. He scrunched the paper in his hand, as if afraid that others might see it. I tried to grab it off him, but he stuffed it in his mouth.
‘It’s no use,’ I said. ‘You can’t hide it now.’
He went so still and limp he might have been dead.
‘When?’ I asked him.
‘After she died,’ he said. ‘She’d left me. What was I to do?’
I looked him in the eye.
‘It wasn’t the first time,’ I said.
‘You don’t know how difficult it was,’ he said, ‘when I woke up that night with a hard-on. I had to do it, even if Mum swore at me and hit me. I felt like I’d been stripped naked when she found out, I thought it was the end of everything. But then I realised that I never had to be ashamed again.
‘After that I couldn’t stop wanking. I did it over and over again, imagining fucking a girl, fucking her hole. But this was all fantasy. I’d never actually seen a woman’s body. I had only ever seen my mum. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a tit when she came out of the shower, or when we went to sleep.
‘One night I saw a flash of her belly — one of the buttons on her top was undone and it was slightly open. I couldn’t stop myself, I had to make my imaginings more real, so I adjusted the covers until I could see the lower part of one breast, a waning moon. I looked away and tried to get back to sleep.
‘But the next night I had to have another look. This was a beautiful woman’s body, right next to me. I’d seen the stupidest, ugliest women. But my mother — you’ve seen her. Even dead, she’s stunning. Why would I choose someone ugly over her? It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘But this was your mother!’
‘I borrowed her.’ He smiled craftily. ‘Just used her for a bit. Is that really so bad? And she wouldn’t have got pregnant. Past that age. Maybe it sounds strange to you, but you can’t understand famine until you’re hungry.
‘I heard about a shipwreck once. There was no sign of rescue and nothing left to eat or drink. Some of the survivors started to eat the corpses of their shipmates to stay alive. And why not? A dead man is made of meat, just like any animal. The only alternative was for everyone to starve while the flesh that could have saved their lives rotted around them.
‘Here was a woman’s body, here was a starving man, what was wrong with me using it?’
‘What about morality?’ I said.
He laughed grimly.
‘There were two kinds of people on that boat: those who did what they had to, and those who became food for others. Which kind of person are you?’
‘So she hit you?’
‘Yes, she beat me,’ he said. ‘She pulled me upright and beat me, harder than ever before. I held on to her like a drowning man clings to a lifebuoy. I held my mother, and cried and cried. I was sorry that time.’
Beating him must have been like beating herself. Still, no one can beat themselves to death, any more than you can grab your own hair and pull yourself up off the ground.
‘Then how did she die?’ I said.
He answered without hesitation.
‘I beat her to death. She made me hit her,’ he went on. ‘She said I had to beat her to death so she could forget everything.’
‘But surely you knew your mother didn’t want to die?’
A stupid question, of course. Nobody wants to die. But he clearly felt terrible about what he’d done. I was starting to feel sorry for him.
‘Was it an accident?’ I was trying to offer him a way out.
‘No.’
Maybe he wanted to follow his mother but didn’t have the courage to take his own life. Maybe he wanted us to do it for him. But I couldn’t go along with that.
‘Where did that whip come from?’
‘My mum bought it.’
‘When you bought the whip, did it have that sheath?’
‘No, my mum made it later,’ he answered. ‘It took her a long time to find the right material.’