Director's Cut (37 page)

He made himself scarce for an hour or two, following Mr

Lawrence’s instructions. Timing, remember? Timing’s important,
Paul!

“It’s Paula, Mr Lawrence. It’s Paula now, innit?”

“Yes, you’re right. I see it now. Silly of me not to have noticed.”
After picking up the tickets he kept to the backstreets. The filth were in
the High Road, in force, stopping people in the street and showing
them pictures of Sandra. It was like the war, like the cold, cold war,
like Moscow, like Berlin or something, that’s it, hiding in dark

doorways, running across streets, dodging traffic, in high heels,

keeping your back to the wall. A dangerous game. An excellent game.
You knew you were, like, alive. Like the old soldiers used to say – like
the colonel used to say, when he was alive – there was nothing more
exhilarating than a game of hide-and-seek. And the dress riding up all
the time. Like a king pawn opening, he’d say. Like the bloody King’s
Gambit and, that was bloody dodgy.

Darkness crept in mid-afternoon, but that suited him. The old four
o’clock was growing through the foundation. Another hour or two and
he’d look like a Spanish housewife. Sod that for a living. He crept back
to the shop. It was closed. The old man was in his studio and Laura
was still sound asleep. He climbed under the stairs. Wanted a last look.
Kneeling down in a tight dress proved a right game. He had to pull it to
his waist. In the darkness the studio light flooded through the crack in
the wall. He adjusted his eyes. He loved cracks.

The old geezer was still there, standing behind his easel like Vinny
Gough. Dab-dabbing, mixing, squinting, a knife here, a brush there,
the whole game. A serious bloody painter, Paul would say.
But hold on! Hold on just a minute! Forget the painting. Paul
couldn’t believe his eyes. Not the Indian! Not the Paki! That sort of
thing was against their religion, or so he thought. Paul’s mouth
dropped open.

Bombay duck! Holy Fuck! It was like a brown liquorice allsort,
brown and brown with a streak of black running through the middle.
This was the Golden Gate, mate, the Grand Canyon, Niagara bloody
Falls no less. This was cowboy country and he, Paul, wanted to mount
up. Talk about excitement. Talk about Basic Instinct. Sharon Stone is
on the phone. Hit the pause, Santa Claus. Christmas is coming and so
is Paul Knight.

Even the voice was getting excited and he could hear the excited
words. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

And she was giving him the come-on. Not much. Paul could see it
all right. But the old man didn’t seem to notice. Maybe the angle was
wrong for him. But he noticed. Paul didn’t miss a trick like that. And
the dress was raised. No kidding. Paul’s dress was raised. And the soft
lace was tightening by the moment. The old lingerie was wonderful.
No wonder the catalogues were full of it. Paul reached down. No
option, really.

In the narrow road behind the shop the red glow from the High Road
painted the sky above the rooftops. The sky groaned. It was going to
unload, rain or, more likely, snow. It was certainly cold enough. The
red light poured like lava down the sloping slates and curled around
the thick clumps of crawling moss. It seemed to cling to everything as
it edged down the walls to the narrow pavement.

The filth was there, waiting for him. Mr Lawrence had been right. You
had to give it to the old guys. If they’d left it another day, another hour,
it would have been too late. When Mr Lawrence told him, Paul didn’t
believe it at first. Just goes to show. Experience, all that. Paul crept up
to the filth. He had the car window down and was listening to the
radio. Paul could hear Mr Lawrence’s voice, then the woman’s. The
woman from India. She was wired. Mr Lawrence was right about that
too. Clever old geezer. Just goes to show. You couldn’t dismiss the old
geezers out of hand. That’s why they won the war, he supposed. Paul
could still learn a thing or two.

The hammer was in his handbag until he took it out. Just an
ordinary hammer with a wooden shaft and steel head. The steel glinted
red. The filth didn’t know what hit him, just above the ear. Phut! A
dull thud. Like the noise you got when you stuck a knife into a white
leather sofa.

Paul looked about. The road was still empty. He turned off the
filth’s radio and straightened his breasts. On the way out of the narrow
road, on the way to the station, he picked up the suitcase he’d left just
inside the back gate. Now he was going. Trains and boats and planes.
All that. Defensive play. Don’t try and win a drawn game.
Life’s like that: a game of chess – winning, losing, but mostly
Stalemate. You only lost at the end of it. Like…at the…end of it.
He started down the steps of an underpass, taking care in his high
heels. And that’s when he noticed a woman following him. A blonde.
A blond spiky-haired woman in a short burgundy shift with matching
painted toenails – every year’s colour.

The first guest to arrive for the party had stayed till
the end even though his plans had been unexpectedly modified. It meant a change
in venue for the last dance. Auld Lang Syne had to be played away from the Square,
somewhere else, on another crowded street where one pretty face was lost among
others. His encounter with the big guy had probably been a mistake and still
he wasn’t sure who he was and why he had been following. He hadn’t looked like
a copper or, come to that, your average punter, but nowadays who could tell?
Long gone were the days when you could go by looks alone. The police force,
in particular, was more than likely employing dwarfs, Gypsies and – he smiled
– even trannies to satisfy the PC brigade. And as for the punters – lords, MPs,
film stars, judges, you name it. The world had gone mad. Still, since being
seen was no longer an issue, it meant he could look into the eyes and that was
always special.

And so for this final frolic he had chosen his partner and he stared
across the road at the young woman who was struggling with her
suitcase, uneasy on sky-high heels. She moved along the pavement, her
right arm and shoulder sagging under the weight of the case. At times,
as she moved past the window displays, she was bathed in light. Her
tight blue dress was a second skin. But she needed a coat. It was
freezing. If she wasn’t careful she would catch her death.

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.