Verismo Bliss - Chapter 17

17.

His head hurt so much it felt like…actually, it hurt so much he couldn’t concentrate on finding a pithy metaphor for how it felt. Also, the pain in his chest was complicating matters.
Harry was tied to a wooden chair in the middle of Gwendolyn’s apartment. He was facing the couch, with the bed to his right and the window to his left. It was still dark out. He figured he hadn’t been out that long. Maybe an hour? Gwen was nowhere to be seen, but her brother was close enough to be touched, if Harry had anything to touch him with besides his pain. Harry had been stripped to the waist and Oliver was drawing pretty patterns of red across Harry’s abdomen and chest with a knife that was as small and precise as a surgeon’s blade. Harry groaned and bit his lip.
Oliver looked up. ‘Awake! Huzzah!’ he said, and waved the blade about as though encouraging the troops.
Oliver looked wild. His eyes flashed from object to object, unable to focus on anything. He mumbled to himself, the way paranoid tramps huddled in doorways did, but would then suddenly burst into some exultation of excitement. All this with a blade in his hand.
‘It’s so hard to write a clear sentence in blood,’ he declared, returning to Harry’s flesh. Oliver didn’t press hard into the skin, but the blade cut the skin so expertly that it was almost an exquisite pain, to start with, then the soreness took over and it was like an all consuming sun burn.
‘Oliver.’
Oliver hummed a tune.
‘Oliver. Oliver.’
‘Hum hum.’
‘Where’s Gwen?’
Oliver punched him in the side of the head. It wasn’t a hard punch, Oliver wsn’t that muscular, but it still made Harry’s ears ring and eyes water.
‘You don’t fucking use your mouth, your dirty mouth,’ Oliver said, gripping Harry’s lips and pushing them about, ‘to say that name. That name on your lips is…blasphemy!’ Oliver put the knife against Harry’s cheek. ‘Shall I cut you a new mouth, dirty man? One to speak good things. You can be like Jekyll and Hyde. Good mouth. Bad mouth. Bad mouth. Good mouth. Good mouth. Bad mouth.’ As he chanted he tapped the knife from Harry’s lips to his cheek and back again. ‘Good mouth. Bad mouth. Good mouth. Good mouth. Good mouth.’ He tapped the lips again and again. ‘Bad mouth!’ The blade ripped along Harry’s cheek, making him gasp with the pain.
‘I know what you wanted to do with her,’ Oliver continued, pacing up and down the room. ‘Just like all the other perverts did. Money. You think money can buy you pussy? The pussy may open at your dirty cash but it’s really closed. It’s a fucking man-trap. Clamping your dirty diseased cock inside. And I am the woodman coming along to chop off your head.’
Harry tried to keep his breathing slow and relaxed, trying to control the pain. This was a bad situation. A really fucking bad situation. He was tied to a chair, half naked, with a drug strung out kid with a blade and an attitude to use it on Harry. Where the fuck was Gwen? She’d tried to warn him, he remembered that, just before he’d been cartoon whacked with a kitchen implement. He’d fucking laugh about that if he ever got out of here. He tested the ropes that held his hands. The kid might be out of it but he’d obviously remembered his Scouting skills – or more likely Falsham had sent his son and heir to the modern day equivalent of the Hitler-Jugend (more commonly known as the Conservative Future Group).
A lull had come over the storm that was Oliver. He sat on the bed, hair hanging forward, the knife limp in his hand. ‘Love. Love. Love. All you need is bollocks. Lurve. Lurve. Shit, how pathetic. You,’ he said, pointing the knife at Harry, ‘what is the use of love when it tears out your insides? Tell, what use is love?’
‘None,’ Harry said. ‘It’s only good when it’s returned in equal measure.’
Oliver’s head fell to one side, and he stared at the ceiling. ‘Equal measure. Equal and opposite reaction. Maybe you’re right.’ He pulled off one of his rings and started at the Kabuki like demon mask. ‘What do you think?’ He put the ring to his ear. ‘Love is an empty sounding trumpet.’ He slipped the ring back on.
‘Oliver, what are you on?’
‘The bed.’
Harry didn’t feel like smiling but he did – the only thing worse than a lover scorned was a comedian who got no laughs. ‘What have you taken?’
Oliver rolled on the bed. ‘Something that makes women burst. Wave after wave. Gives them a tsunami; a volcano; an earthquake; all rolled up into one. La grande mort. And what are we left with my friend?’
‘La petite mort.’
‘Tiny, tiny, but the drug makes me feel huge. Makes me feel like a huge cock waiting to cum. And I like that. It makes me feel nothing much else and everything at the same time. It mixes up my confusion. If you can’t think straight then you can’t concentrate on what causes you pain, dig? I can smell her, you know?’ He buried his face into a pillow. ‘Arrrgh…how she smells. Like spring and autumn rolled into one.’
‘Oliver, have you taken Bliss?’ Harry asked. ‘Oliver? Bliss shouldn’t affect you like this, maybe you’ve had a bad dose; it should only affect you like this if…’ He paused, suddenly remembering a taxi ride to Heathrow and what he had been told about Bliss. ‘Oh, fuck.’
Oliver leapt from the bed and sat on Harry’s lap, like an overly aggressive lap dancer, and put the knife under Harry’s left eye. ‘You are winter, why you want to screw with spring?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Liar!’ Oliver pushed the knife into the skin. ‘Why does she do it? I could give her money. She doesn’t need the money. And now with the baby. Who’s the father? She won’t tell me - maybe it’s yours?’
‘I’m with the 99.’
‘Maybe yes. Maybe no. She’s gone. She always goes when I’m like this. It’s what she does best: disappears. Poof! Any trouble then bye-bye Gwendolyn. We grew up together. Discovered the world together. It was only natural that…She doesn’t love me, I don’t think. I told her I would help look after the baby. If she’d just stop all this, with people like you. Stop it and live with me. But she knew Daddy would cut her off. All this, this playing at poverty, is just to experience life, but she has the safety net of Daddy’s millions. She can’t fly without the safety net. I wish I knew who it was - who put that life inside her.’
‘Maybe I could help,’ Harry said, trying to inch his face away from the blade.
‘Huh?’
‘I’m a detective, remember? It’s the sort of thing I do. Divorce case. Paternity cases a speciality.’
‘You think I want you snooping around? Like you snooped in her bedroom? Putting your dirty fingers into her things, looking with your dirty eyes at her beautiful clothes? I don’t want you looking into her life. You would corrupt her soul. I want you gone, just like all the others had to go.’
Oliver put the knife against Harry’s throat. Harry could feel the jugular vein throbbing, throbbing until all he could hear was his heart: a heavy, beating tribal drum, beating out a warning. Is this the way it was going to be? Was it going to be this easy to slip from the world?
‘People know I’m here,’ Harry said, his throat so dry that it hurt to speak. ‘They know I came here with Gwen. If you kill me they will go looking for her.’
‘Not if I cut you into a thousand pieces and drop you in the Thames.’
Harry thought of Mary. Would he see her again? Somehow he doubted it. The knife pressed against his throat. How odd, he thought, that he should die at the hands of one so young. In the moments that the knife began to cut his skin it felt as though time had slowed to a crawl and he had time, so much precious time, to think his final thoughts. He wondered who would come to the funeral. When it came down to it he really didn’t have any close friends. Raphael and Sylvia came the closest, he supposed. Who else would see him out on his final journey? Jack would be there; Jack liked a good wake, did Jack. And Porkpie; he’d be fun, cracking jokes about death. Hopkins, would Hopkins come? Karl Carr would no doubt turn up in the hope of ‘comforting’ some grief stricken woman. Not that there would be many of them. Would his San Francisco girl make the trip? Nope, she wouldn’t even know, probably wouldn’t know for years after his body had been thrown to the wind. Would Ramona be there? Sure, she would be there dressed up like some exotic black widow spider and Carr and she would fuck each other afterwards and trade stories about him. Bollocks, were his last thoughts on Earth going to be such bitter ones?
He felt the blade force itself into his skin with such a light headed exquisiteness that he wondered if dying wasn’t going to be all that big a deal. But death, of course, was never known to the living. Death was that great stag night train journey – disorientated, disrobed and dumped on a night train to destinations unknown by your friends. You woke up in Siberia or Shanghai. Or you didn’t wake up at all.
He felt a warm vibration in his leg and worried that he was pissing himself. He didn’t want to soil himself. Why though, he didn’t know. What did it matter? Would Carr stand over his body and hold his nose and shake his head and mutter that he always knew there was a reason old Harry couldn’t pull the birds. He saw himself surrounded by cops and lab guys. His body exposed and pushed and prodded about by Porkpie and weighed and measured and documented, just as his vital statistics had been taken when he had emerged screaming into the world. They measure you in and they measure you out, he thought to himself.
He saw himself dead.
For the first time in a long time he actually longed for life. But a small Soho blade was going to take it from him.