Being (31 page)

The ceiling fan whirred.

The air smelled of death.

Fireworks crackled faintly in the distance.

I started walking across the room.

Ryan watched me. I saw him glance over at Cooper and shake his head, then he looked back at me again. I walked past him and stopped in front of Eddi. For a moment I just stood there, looking down at her… her beautiful face, her pale white skin, her hands, her hair, her fading blue eyes. It was all nothing now. She was nothing.

She wasn’t Eddi any more.

She wasn’t anything.

I knelt down beside her and gently adjusted her dress. It had ridden up over her thighs when she’d fallen. As I smoothed it down over her legs, a drop of blood dripped from her head, spotting the sheer white cotton. I stared at the small red stain for a moment, then I reached out slowly and touched it with the tip of my finger. The blood was cold and sticky.

I licked it from my finger.

She was in me now. She was with me forever.

I leaned over and kissed her cold lips.

I closed her eyes.

I licked my finger again and wiped the trickle of blood from her forehead.

Then I ran my bloodied fingertip down my face – once, twice – from the corner of each eye to the corners of my mouth, painting my cheeks with tears of blood.

I turned to Ryan. ‘I can’t cry,’ I told him. ‘Something happens to me. The doors close, the lights go out. I disappear.’

He looked at me, but said nothing.

I reached over and picked up Eddi’s pistol from the floor.

‘Don’t do it, Robert…’ I heard Ryan say.

I looked at the gun in my hand. It was smaller than the one she’d kept in the bedside cabinet, and I wondered briefly where she’d hidden it and why she’d never told me about it…

It didn’t matter.

I stood up, holding Eddi’s pistol down at my side, and turned to face Ryan. He wasn’t pointing his gun at me, but it was in his hand and his finger was poised on the trigger.

‘You might as well put the gun down, Robert,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s not going to do you any good. If you so much as think about using it, Cooper’s going to shoot you.’

I turned and looked at Cooper. He hadn’t moved. He was still standing there with his pistol levelled at my head and I didn’t doubt that Ryan was right. The big man was just waiting for an excuse to pull the trigger.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, smiling at him, ‘it’s over now. You can relax. I’m not going to do anything.’

Cooper didn’t react for a moment, he just kept on staring coldly at me, and then I saw his eyes flick over at Ryan. It was no more than a momentary glance, a quick look of uncertainty, but that was all I needed. I raised my arm and shot Cooper twice in the chest. He managed to fire back at me, but he was already staggering by then and the shot went harmlessly into the ceiling. I watched as he fell to the floor, waited until he’d stopped moving, then I lowered the pistol and turned back to Ryan.

The pistol in his outstretched hand was aimed directly at my head.

‘Don’t make me do it, Robert,’ he said carefully. ‘Don’t
make me pull the trigger. I don’t want to, but I will. I swear to God…’

I looked at him for a long time, staring down the barrel of his gun, gazing into his silver eyes… letting him think whatever he wanted to think. I didn’t care any more. I dropped my pistol to the floor, turned my back on him and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

‘Robert?’ he called after me. ‘What are you…? Robert?’

I ignored him and went into the bathroom. Hayes was lying face down on the floor with the hypodermic needle stuck in her neck. I squatted down and checked her pulse. She was still alive.

I stood up and looked in the mirror. The blood-streaked thing looking back at me wasn’t a face. It was just a thing… a thing of skin and bone. Lips, teeth, eyes, blood-red tears… the shape of a skull.

Nothing.

I opened a cabinet above the sink and took out a razor blade.

When I went back into the front room, Ryan was still sitting on the settee. He’d picked up my pistol and placed it next to his on the cushion beside him. I knew he still had another one in his pocket, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more.

I sat down in the armchair opposite him. ‘Hayes is all right,’ I said. ‘She’s not dead. Eddi just stuck the needle in her neck.’

Ryan nodded. ‘I’m sorry about Eddi, Robert… I’m really sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’

‘You’ll never know,’ I told him.

He frowned at me. ‘I’ll never know what?’

I said nothing, just looked at him.

He shook his head. ‘Listen, Robert… I know you don’t want to believe me, but what I said earlier, about all this being for your own good… it’s the truth. No one was meant to get hurt. We just want to help you.’ He looked at me. ‘Just give us a chance, Robert… listen to me. Let me explain who we are –’

‘I don’t care who you are.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘But don’t you want to know –?’

‘I don’t want to know anything.’

He leaned forward and looked me in the eye. ‘We can find out everything about you, Robert. We can find out what you are, where you came from, why you’re here –’

‘I don’t care why I’m here. I don’t care about any of it – what I am, where I came from, who you are… none of it means anything. It never did.’ I looked at him. ‘It’s time to end it now.’

‘What?’

‘I want to show you something.’

As I reached into my pocket and took out the razor blade, Ryan snatched up his pistol and swung it in my direction.

‘What are you doing?’ he snapped.

‘Just watch,’ I told him.

Holding the razor blade in my right hand, I clenched the fist of my left hand and held the arm out in front of me. I looked over at Ryan. He’d put the gun down now and was watching me intently. I pressed the razor blade into the fleshy part of my left arm and slowly drew it
down. A thick red slice opened up, and I let the pain flood through me.

Don’t think any more.

Just feel the pain…

Nothing else.

I stood up and walked over to Ryan. His eyes were transfixed, staring at the coloured liquids dripping from the gash in my arm. White blood, black blood, luminous silver blood. I stopped in front of him and held out my arm. He leaned forward and gazed curiously at the wound. I don’t know what he saw – red things, pulsing things, the shadows of silver bones. I didn’t care.

‘Remember it,’ I said to him. ‘You’ll never see it again.’

He looked up at me, started to say something, and I hammered my fist into his head.

I hit him hard enough to kill him. Bones cracked in my fist, and as he crashed down to the floor and collapsed, I thought for a moment that I
had
killed him. He was lying on his back, his arms and legs splayed out like the limbs of a broken doll. His eyes were closed. His mouth was half open. Blood and spit and bits of teeth were dribbling down his chin. The side of his face was misshapen – caved in and hanging down – and the skin around his jaw was turning black.

He didn’t seem to be breathing.

I picked up Eddi’s pistol and crouched down beside him. When I lowered my head to his, I could just make out a weak gurgling sound in the back of his throat.

He was breathing.

He wasn’t dead.

I gazed into his face for a moment, wondering what lay beneath that tired grey skin. Bones and feelings. Blood and memories. Secrets, lies, big things, small things…?

He’d never know.

I stood up and looked over at Eddi. She was still sitting there. Her eyes were still closed.

The fireworks had stopped now.

The room was cold and silent.

I looked down at Ryan again and levelled the gun at his head. I stood there for a long time, thinking of all the things he’d done – to me, to Eddi, to everything that might have been – and I came very close to pulling the trigger.

But I didn’t.

Dying wasn’t enough for him.

I wanted him to live – to live without ever knowing what I was. That was his death: to live without knowing.

I lowered the pistol and set about leaving.

There was nothing inside me as I moved around the flat, stuffing things into my pockets. I had nothing left. I was empty. Finished. Disconnected. Something knew what I was doing, and where I was going, and what I was going to do when I got there, but it wasn’t me. I had no self any more. I wasn’t Robert Smith. I was just a thing – looking for my passport, pocketing some cash, picking up the keys to Eddi’s motorbike.

I didn’t look at Eddi on the way out.

I couldn’t look at her.

She wasn’t there.

Nothing was there.

∗

Downstairs, everything was quiet. No fireworks, no voices, no sign of the Garcias or Chico. I walked along the darkened hallway and opened the door to the Garcias’ kitchen. Chico was lying dead on the floor, a bullet hole in the back of his head.

I closed the door and went back down the hallway.

I was nothing now. Timeless. Placeless. Thoughtless. My head was dead, the things inside it black and distant. Eddi Ray. David Ryan. Living things. Dead things. Robert Smith. The things I should have done, the things I shouldn’t have done. The future, the past. Memories: a fat man in a cheap red suit, jellies, sweets, a long table and benches; the smell of disinfectant; the sound of laughter; faces, figures, unknown voices; childhood dreams of whirling winds, whirling waters, spinning me round and round, sucking me down into the darkness…

The past…

The future.

Now.

I was empty.

I was just whatever I was, wherever I was – an empty thing in an empty house, walking slowly down an empty hallway… opening the front door, looking around, gazing up at the clear night sky…

The stars were out.

Twinkling brightly…

I didn’t stop to wonder what they were.

I went back into the house, wheeled out Eddi’s motorbike, and rode off into the darkness.