* * *
The morning feels wrong straight from the off. He opens his eyes to unfamiliar surroundings. It still confuses him for the first few seconds, waking up in the sitting room. But today the ceiling looks lower, the walls closer. A thick fog hangs about his head. A bad case of Morning Mouth. Coloured lines have drawn themselves around his furniture and the carpet slowly ripples in gentle, nauseating waves.
He stumbles into the kitchen, knocks into the cat’s water and sluices it over the floor. Two green eyes glare at him from under the table. What is this – another hunger strike? For the third day running Scoff has barely touched his food. Or some kind of perverse loyalty – Daniel himself has eaten almost nothing in all that time. Like Scoff, he just can’t find the appetite. He prods the hunk of dead flesh that sits on the worktop. The thought of cooking it turns his stomach. A moat of blood encircles the meat, almost breaching the plate’s shallow rim. The joint appears to float, as though twice as much again lies beneath the surface, the indent from his finger returning slowly to shape. An unnerving sight – as if the slaughter hadn’t killed the beast – still it breathes. Today carries a warning. Today is an ominous distortion of surfaces and angles and objects. Somehow he must pull himself together and get the meal prepared, the flat spruced up and everything ready for his conquest.
But there remains the question of Alex. Not a squeak out of him as yet, but just having him around spells doom for the whole venture. Time for a few new ground rules. He’ll explain about Gulnaz, man-to-man. Alex will understand. Daniel throws together a light breakfast on a tray and carries it through to the bedroom. To his surprise, Alex is already out of bed, seated by the window and staring at the backyard through the bars, the crutches propped neatly against the side of the chair.
“Here. Listen, I want you to stay put today, okay – until tonight.”
He’s granted one of those unintelligible replies. It hasn’t escaped Daniel’s attention that Alex’s speech is the one thing not to have improved. How convenient; it wouldn’t surprise him one bit if it was deliberate, a way of making a point: Alex stays answerable to nobody. Man-to-man doesn’t bode well. Better to say nothing about Gulnaz.
“I mean it, Alex. I’m going to be busy. I won’t have time to watch over you. If you do this, tonight I promise we’ll watch a video or something. And tomorrow I’ll take you out, round the park. Deal?”
His proposal meets with the most chilling of looks. Recently, Alex’s eyes have begun to make Daniel’s flesh crawl. Daniel knows when he can push his brother and when he can’t. He withdraws without further word and leaves him to his breakfast. That clawing sense of claustrophobia is back. His hands are shaking as he begins to season the joint and lift it into the roasting tin. It isn’t only Alex who refuses to behave. At some point the pilot light must have gone out. Only the strong smell of gas finally raises the alarm. Even then, Daniel has the matchbox opened inside the oven before pausing to consider the wisdom in that moment of a naked flame. After flinging open every window and door of the flat he tries again. The first match fails to catch – and the second, the shakes so bad now that he can barely bring match head and strike zone together. With a whoosh, the oven lights on the third attempt, but his temples are thumping; the sweat from his hair stings his eyes. Perhaps that’s why he turns to the vodka – almost unprecedented at ten thirty in the morning. By the time the beef is in and his attention turned to the potatoes, Daniel has pretty much lost the plot. Sod the meal, he’s beyond caring now. Either it’ll be edible or it won’t. There’ll either have sex or they won’t. If they do, it’ll be no thanks to Alex. If they don’t, it’ll all be Alex’s doing. Daniel has the strangest sense that Alex has taken control of his movements as well as his thoughts – the knife in his hand that pares away the potato skins, leaving them creamy-white and slithery, could at any moment turn upon his own flesh and peel it back to the same weeping, translucence beneath. He fancies himself stretching out a hand and lowering it onto the blue flame of the gas hob, Alex all the while willing it with those menacing eyes from the corner of his room. Alex, jealous of his affair with Gulnaz, no doubt coveting her, wanting what is rightfully Daniel’s.
Great bubbles jostle each other around the base of the saucepan as he scoops in the hunks of potato, water jumping out across the cooker at every splash, sizzling its way down the sides of the pan, leaving starch trails in its wake, the flames tickled yellow by its touch. For five minutes Daniel stares into the pot. He can smell the starch, feel the warmed air rising, see the thickening water; his mouth salivates but without hunger.
He fails to notice the movement behind him. The figure emerging from the bedroom simply doesn’t register. And the fixed gaze that drills into the back of his head is deflected by the wall of concentration needed just to carry the pan from the stove to the sink. There could not be a worse time to call out than this. Nobody could calculate their timing with more deadly precision. And nobody could react more catastrophically than Daniel.
As Alex’s cry shatters the silence, so Daniel’s wrist flicks upwards. The water in the pan sloshes forward over the handle, splashes his forearm and triggers the instinct to let go. Impossibly slowly, as though giving ample time to escape it, the pan falls and strikes the edge of the sink and showers its contents over Daniel’s stomach and crotch.
The scream must be all of three octaves outside his normal range. For a moment, he just stares down at himself, arms apart and hands opened like he’s bragging over a catch. His scream was one of shock, and the shock his brief analgesic. But a nerve-splitting, flesh-stabbing pain racks him suddenly, the pain of a thousand potato peelers stripping him from belly to knee. Then he’s a mad thing, tearing at his shirt and trousers to remove the steaming cloth, standing glistening pink over the sink and heaping handfuls of water at himself. Expletives explode like grenades into the air.
“The phone! Get me the fucking phone!! Shit, shit, shit. Now! I need it now! Alex – you useless heap of shit – not tomorrow fucking morning…”
Like stepping wet from a shower to retrieve a forgotten towel, he totters naked across the kitchen, petrified of creasing any part of his torso. His shaking hand fumbles with the phone and stabs at the numbers.
“(Hurry up. Hurry up, damn you). Hello!? Hello, yeah, ’course it’s me. You gotta come over, now. Never mind ‘early’. I’m fucking injured here – really bad. Alex just tried to kill me! No – I’m fucking serious. I’m really badly burned.” Just hearing his own words sends him further into a state of hysteria. “What? What?? Water! Boiling water all down my front. Yeah, yeah I did that. No of course not for ten minutes. Uhu? Really? Okay, but hurry up!!”
He slams down the phone and staggers through to the shower, shivering violently. Gulnaz’s first-aid instructions didn’t actually include knocking back a half bottle of scotch, but then, even Nurse Gulnaz couldn’t begin to imagine the pain, especially once those needle-sharp jets begin pricking into his skin. The water pressure literally strips away a whole layer. He has to watch as little rolls of flesh just slither down his legs, past the hideous lobster slung between. He thinks he might pass out. Desperate to stay with it, he swigs hard at the bottle before unscrewing the showerhead. Heat such as he’s never imagined defies the spouting water, springing back to the surface the instant it passes. It seems impossible for flesh to go on burning for so long. He lays himself gingerly onto the cold metal of the bathtub, takes the hose between his knees and leaves it to pour across his whole belly.
By the time help arrives at the door, the scotch is finished and Daniel semiconscious.