The Unblemished (9 page)

'Why did you come here, if you're going to be so stiff with me?'

'Good question,' he said, although he was wounded by the implication
that his visits to her were solely about sex. It was still early in
their relationship, and the physical side of things was enormously
compelling, animalistic, desperate even, but he needed more from her
now. He needed to know he could just be with her, gain strength and
comfort from her without any fluid exchange. Again he wondered
about her age. He oughtn't put too many demands on her that she
could not fulfil. But it was becoming an issue. Perhaps the novelty
was wearing off. Perhaps he should end it, before things became too
painful. And then he realised selfishly that he couldn't. He needed
her.

He lay on her bed as she undressed, grateful that she had not
pursued the conversation into darker territory, and took in the
pictures on her wall. Her taste wasn't exactly in tune with his own,
but that was a good thing, he thought. Her pictures were interesting
to him nonetheless and, though it was taking it a bit too far to say he
liked them, he certainly didn't dislike them. They were her, which was
good enough for him. There was nothing expensive, just a few prints
by Colin Slee, Nel Whatmore, a couple of photographs by Andy
Warhol and Eve Arnold. It was a relaxing montage, and not for the
first time he found it triggering the question of him,
What is it you
want to do?
He felt as though time was passing him by and he had
yet to find his voice – or more accurately, his eye – with the camera.

It prickled him a little that Keiko did not have any of his photographs
on her walls, but why should she? What had he contributed to that
rich tradition? His work was a mess. Yasushi Nagao had been 31
when he won the World Press Photo Award. Stanislav Tereba had
been 20. His own enthusiasm could not be called into question, but
maybe he should be feeling more hungry, more driven.

'Relax, Bobo,' Keiko said now. 'I know you don't want me, but
was all my hard work in vain?'

'Sorry,' he said. 'Just had a shitty day. I can't let go of stuff.'

'So I see.' She climbed on to the bed with him. She was wearing a
white cotton thong and a tight white vest. Her breasts were clearly
visible beneath it. It helped a little. She was very easy on the eye. Her
long, professionally cut hair was so black it seemed almost purple in
this subdued light. Her playful features always seemed to be mocking
him. He liked the thin spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose,
the constellation of five beauty spots in the gulley between her
breasts. He reached up for her and she held him. He breathed in the
fresh smell of her hair. Sirens dopplered along Christchurch Road. He
suddenly felt sick and lurched to the bathroom. She was at his
shoulder immediately, and he could feel her watching him as he
retched fruitlessly into the toilet. Her hands on his shoulders again
felt too invasive; he shrugged her off and could tell just by the shift of
air in the room that she had left him alone. He sensed the light
intensify; the music died. The impersonal chunter of TV sound
replaced it.

He washed his face and brushed his teeth. Although he hadn't
physically been sick, he felt a little better.

The mood she had tried to create was shattered for good. She had
changed while he was composing himself; she wore pyjamas and a
towelling bathrobe knotted at the waist. Her arms were crossed on
top of it. He resisted the urge to offer to get her a padlock, just to
make sure. She steadfastly refused to acknowledge that he had
returned to the bedroom.

Newsnight
had just started. He cursed his rudeness; now he saw
that he must put up with the whole Leonard Wright affair again. It
was the lead story. He perched on the edge of the bed and felt the heat
drain from his face as it became clear that the desecration of Wright's
grave was no ugly one-off. Seven more cemeteries across the capital
had been filched of fresh cadavers. As in Wright's case, the bodies had
been mauled, partially consumed, and discarded for some poor sod to
stumble upon as they brought flowers for their relatives' graves. 'Oh
God,' he said. 'Oh God.'

There was no need for him to apologise to Keiko; her hand came
again to his shoulder. He realised he couldn't watch any more of the
news report, not because it was too harsh to stomach, but because he
was crying so hard he could no longer see it. Her voice was ragged
with shock.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I didn't realise how awful ...'

He couldn't say anything. He drew her close to him and cried until
his stomach hurt. By the time he had purged himself, she was asleep
and the news programme was over. He watched what had replaced it
blankly for half an hour without any attempt to follow its thread. He
switched off the set and lay in the dark, trying to combat the rush of
fear that swept in with the shadows. He knew what he would see if
he went to the curtains and looked down to the main road. Every
time he closed his eyes to escape the play of night he was granted a
peek inside that foetid mouth that had yawned for him earlier in the
evening. The contents had been chewed with gusto, and their shape
was not so easy to discern, but there was no doubt in his mind that
what he had been staring at was a jumble of fingers from Leonard
Wright's hands.

He left early the next morning before Keiko wakened, wanting to
avoid any awkwardness with her. They had been involved long
enough to be able to sit comfortably in the nude with each other –
Keiko had no compunction about peeing with the bathroom door
open – but emotional nakedness was another thing. Bo went straight
back to his flat and collected his camera and however many rolls of
film he could carry in his pockets. He scanned the BBC website to find
out which cemeteries had been desecrated, then set off for the nearest.

He powered his Kawasaki through the somnolent streets of Maida
Vale, wishing, as he did occasionally – but more often than not when
he wasn't riding the bike – that he had used the cash to buy a couple
of luxury holidays. He had not enjoyed a decent vacation for over five
years. He had bought the bike in a moment of insanity, believing that
to be able to chicane through London's traffic to a job would give
him precious advantages over any car-bound competition. It was
pure look-at-the-size-of-my-bollocks testosterone ... and a skilled
salesman who had nudged him into buying the ZX9R Ninja, a
superbike that was more at home on racing tracks than inner city
congestion zones. Opening the throttle on the M1 at dawn or on
some of the winding hilly roads in Derbyshire, he felt utterly vindicated
in his choice of transportation, but mainly he was faintly
disgusted with himself. A cheaper, less thirsty model would have
proved just as useful, and left him with change to keep his bank
account ticking over, or cheer him up with the odd treat.

Abney Park cemetery he'd visited just once before, around ten
years previously, when he first arrived in London and was living with
a woman who had a thing about headstones. They'd gone looking for
blue-chip graves but the only name Bo had recognised belonged to the
founder of the Salvation Army. But it had been early days with that
new girlfriend. He hadn't spent a lot of time paying much attention
to the scenery.

He chained the motorbike up on Church Street. Apart from one
unmanned police car parked on double yellow lines there was nothing
to suggest anything was amiss here. He bought a newspaper and a
takeaway coffee and nervously perused the headlines, keeping half an
eye on the entrance. The camera hanging on his shoulder burned into
his flesh. Why was the entrance not cordoned off?

The newspapers were all over the story, but Abney Park was not
mentioned in the article, which gave him pause. For the first time he
suspected he'd got things wrong, but he was convinced that Kirsty
Wark had named this cemetery in her report on television the
previous night. He called Keiko to confirm this but either her phone
was switched off or, more likely, she was ignoring his calls.

Bo folded the newspaper and stuck it in his back pocket. He
approached the steps up to the entrance and at the top scanned the
street behind him, while absently rubbing at the palm of his left hand.
He had crazy ideas of police snipers on rooftops, a helicopter buzzing
in low to observe his actions, but there was nothing, just a few bleary eyed
people making their way to work.

Inside, no forensic tents, no constables forming a human blockade.
He opened his camera bag and took out his Nikon, loaded it with a
roll of Kodak Professional.

The graveyard retained that same controlled wildness he remembered
from before. Much of the planting was from Victorian times
and the pathways had just the right amount of greenery threatening
them without making headway uncomfortable. The trees exuded a
gravitas that didn't exist in the parks; they were broad, sombre. Pretty
soon it became easy to forget that one of the busiest main roads in
north London – Stoke Newington High Street – was just a couple of
hundred yards to the east.

Abney Park had been specified, he tried to persuade himself. It
had. It
had.
But no, it hadn't. Not on this evidence: the cemetery was
empty. He was relieved and disappointed in equal measure, but not
so hung up on his various psychoses that he couldn't smile a little at
the contradiction of an 'empty' graveyard. And anyway, there didn't
appear to be any new plots. This must be a cemetery that had reached
its limit, which was refusing new members as they queued at the
gates.

He began to relax, taking photographs of the partially concealed
stone sarcophagi. Bronze angels half consumed with verdigris rose
out of the shadows in frozen appeals. Headstones planted square-on
had, with time and the unsettled stomachs of the earth, been rendered
askew. The trees breathed on him, a hissing rhythm that nagged
because it had been still on the main road. The leaves shivered,
flashing their pale underbellies at him. The black branches at their
hearts criss-crossed against the blue sky like banning signs. He was
composing a photograph involving a weathered statue that somehow
still retained its poise and elegance when he became aware of
movement in the corner of the eye jammed to the viewfinder.

He looked up in time to see something thin move stumpily into the
trees up ahead and off to the right, as if it had been walking on bare
feet across flints. Its clothing was ragged, like the flayed clothing he
had seen still attached to blast victims in photographs from the war.
The blades of shadow cast by the crosses and obelisks had interfered
with the figure and made its head seem deformed. It might be a tramp
or someone visiting the cemetery to get a break from the constant
headache of traffic. But he couldn't get the thought from his mind
that it might instead be some famished thing with dirt under its nails
and a need that could not be conventionally assuaged.

Bo attached the 200mm lens with shaking hands and trained it on
the area of foliage that had swallowed the figure. He cursed himself
for not bringing his tripod: his heart was beating so hard that it was
difficult to keep the camera steady. What he thought was movement
might only be the sway of shrubbery, or his own trembling. It was
pointless. The only way he would make sure of what he'd seen
was to follow it.

He had to wrap his handkerchief around his hand as he was
rehousing the lens in the camera bag. His sudden fear was blinding
him to the blood and lymph creeping out of his palm; the welts there
resembled strokes from a cane. He couldn't read the injury's significance.
Finally he had to curtail his scrutiny of the trees in order to
pack the camera bag properly and clip it shut. He was crouching, his
breath tearing in and out of him, stripping his mouth of moisture.
Why couldn't some other fucker come through here walking his dog
or carrying a bunch of lilies?

He felt compelled to investigate, despite the urging from his back
brain to get the hell out. More movement. He thought he saw another
shape descending quickly, spastically, through the trees, with so much
foolhardy intent in its limbs Bo thought it must fall. He angled
towards the disturbance, moving off the path so that his feet could
not crunch on the gravel, his finger tapping gently, nervously, against
the shutter release as if it was the trigger of something that could
defend him. He reached a border of grass that fringed the top of his
thighs. Brambles and convolvulus lay beyond like mantraps. He
picked his way through it all, aware of the branches leaning down as
if to shield his eyes from something he must not see. He heard violent
sound now: splitting, cracking. He heard the squabbling of things
that didn't own voices.

It was enough. He could not proceed. He was turning to leave, no
longer keen to have his curiosity assuaged, when he saw three
shadows stagger across the path he intended to retreat along. He
looked up and saw movement, then heard something whisper
although he couldn't be sure if it was grass or tongues. He was put in
mind of scarecrows come to life.

He resumed his forward movement, more urgently now, as it
seemed more attractive to approach something that in all likeliness
was unaware of him than something that appeared to be hunting him
down. He broke through into a clearing and had to drop to his knees,
not so much to keep himself concealed but to prevent himself from
seeing more of what he had glimpsed. A glimpse was enough. It
would remain in his thoughts for ever, as if he had taken a photograph
and framed it on a wall he walked past every day.

He found himself weeping as something stumbled through the
grasses trying to find him. He almost didn't care if it did. Perhaps it
would help him, in some unspeakable way, to forget the sight of
denuded creatures ransacking the bones of a small skeleton.