The Way Out Read online

  At that moment a customer pushed through the door, making the bell ring. Hamid flicked the remaining blackened scraps of meat from the grill into a paper wrapper and dropped it into the bin.

  The rest of the evening went by with a constant stream of customers. Ali came back from his break and the three of us worked steadily, the column of donner meat reducing as slice after slice was shaved off and deposited in dozens of pitta breads, topped with salad and chilli sauce. By the end of the night it was shaved down to the metal spit.

  Tidying up in the cellar after closing time with Hamid, the small space felt claustrophobic. He asked when me and Col were getting married.

  ‘Not right now.’

  ‘But you plan to marry?’

  I glanced over at him. He was standing gazing upwards, longingly through the hatch of the cellar, back into the bright light of the shop as if looking at sunshine from behind prison bars.

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘Women here…’ His face was sad and he looked at me with disappointment, his eyes asking how I could have let him down so badly.

  ‘People live together. It’s normal,’ I told him, bristling a little. ‘Gives them a chance to find out if they get on before having kids and all that. Even then, some couples never get married. It’s no big deal.’

  Hamid looked at me like I’d just told him the earth was flat. He reached one hand up towards the light. ‘In my country, a woman is like a flower.’

  I concentrated on gathering up some onions that had spilled out of a torn sack. I cast around for something, maybe some tape, to repair the rip and realised Hamid was looking at me, expecting a response.

  ‘Oh?’ The cellar walls contracted and I strained to hear the sound of Ali moving around upstairs, cleaning down the grills and mopping the floor.

  ‘Once she is plucked,’ Hamid made a mid-air snatching motion with his outstretched hand and stared into my eyes, ‘she dies.’ He shrugged and turned away sorrowfully, started moving boxes around.

  I wanted to ask him what he meant by that. Did he really believe I should just get on with it and die? My face grew hot. I felt my blood spewing through my veins, the pig blood working its way deeper in toward my centre, pushing fast in and out of my heart, the muscle swelling, coarsening, becoming an animal thing.

  I undress and look at myself in the bedroom mirror. White flesh, raw on my bones. I drag an old t-shirt over my head and slide under the sheets. The sweaty soundtrack from the living room oozes through the crack in the door, punctuated by the tight pop of released air when Col opens another beer. The creak of the couch as he settles back down.

  I can’t sleep. The clock says 3.30am. I’ve been lying in bed for an hour, listening to the roar of blood in my ears. The blind pumping machinery of my heart, dense and dark, convulsing, the blood forced this way then that, under pressure from both sides.

  I need to be moving. I throw off the sheets and pull my clothes back on, deciding to go for a walk. There’s only an hour or so before dawn. In the living room, Col is sprawled with his mouth open, snoring. The TV is fuzzed with static, giving out a low whispering breath, like a never-ending exhalation.

  Outside the sky is already lightening to the colour of a fading bruise, the air hanging cool and still, passive in the path of the coming day. I walk for maybe an hour through deserted streets, silent but for the drum of a thousand beating muscles behind stone walls, on and on, working while their owners sleep. I keep walking, my steps falling into rhythm with them, the world throbbing hypnotically under my feet.

  There’s an angry squeal of rubber on tarmac, followed by the blast of a car horn and I realise I’m in the middle of the road. I raise my hands in apology to the driver. He’s right up against his windscreen shouting, spit spraying from his mouth onto the glass. I back away, keeping an eye on him just in case he’s thinking about getting out of his car. And that’s when I make the same mistake again, jumping back onto the traffic island just in time. The truck stops right next to me, blocking my path and lets out a furious hiss like a red hot pan dropped into water.

  The truck is huge with slatted sides. It smells of shit and something worse. The driver leans out of his window. ‘Wake up, doll. I nearly had you there!’

  I mutter my apologies and he disappears back inside.

  From the body of the truck comes the scrape of shuffling feet. Through a gap in the side I see movement in the dark and suddenly a snout is pressed to the gap, wet and trembling, desperately snuffling the free air. Asking: are we here? Is this the place? It’s so close I could touch it, this breathing, questioning thing. The truck rumbles and shakes as the driver throws it back into gear. The snout disappears back into the gloom but in its place comes an eye the colour of blood, framed by white eyelashes and creased pink skin. The pig looks right at me. It sees me and it knows. It knows I don’t have the answer either.

  The truck moves away, huffing exhaust fumes into the early morning air.

  I know the slaughterhouse is nearby. Before long that heart will be silenced. The taste of it rises to my mouth like betrayal. I walk in the opposite direction, cross the road and sink down onto the low wall outside a supermarket. Delivery vans trundle into the car park, past a trough of parched geraniums and round to the back doors. The weight in my chest grows heavier and I think of the pig, freed from the truck, skidding unsteadily down the ramp to the holding pens, blinded by the sudden light that lies between.

  What Remains

  Standing by the sink in his kitchen, Marvin ran his hand under the cold tap until his finger bones ached like the roots of bad teeth. Was this to be the next thing then? Reduced to making tepid cups of tea to save himself from injury at his own shaking hand. He dabbed it dry with a cloth and examined the damage. There was a red scald the shape of Africa on the back of his left hand and it was beginning to hurt.

  He looked out at the other houses lit in a golden haze from the streetlights. In the small upstairs bedroom of the house opposite, the pacing silhouette of a woman with a baby circled in the muted yellow light, round and round, like a sleepy goldfish. He pushed the window open a crack and listened to the child’s cries rising and falling; a tiny human siren protesting the night.

  Some days Marvin passed the mother in the street, her hair unwashed, narrow shoulders hunched. She looked like the stroller was the only thing holding her up. He’d offered to help her with her groceries once but she’d looked at him as if he’d volunteered to tap dance naked, and hurried into her house. Perhaps she didn’t speak English. Considering how rarely folks around here spoke to each other these days, for all he knew they could each be speaking their own private languages.

  Marvin didn’t sleep a whole lot anymore. The small hours often found him in the kitchen, making tea to take back to bed. He still lay on the left hand side. The right retained Kath’s shape, and although she hadn’t filled it for over a decade now, when he woke with the scent of her around his face, the taste of her on his lips, he would reach into the empty space and find her gone all over again. After forty years together, what was left now but to miss her?

  There was no point going back to the States. There was nothing there for him anymore, not even a decent cup of tea. At least here he could feel he was still with Kath, surrounded by what remained. This house. These memories. She used to joke he was her war bride. Instead of the pair of them shipping off to the States when they’d married after the war, she’d convinced him to make the move to her side of the Atlantic. Not that he’d put up much of a fight. He’d have moved to Timbuktu if that was what she’d wanted. They’d had a good life together. Children hadn’t come along, which was a sadness, but they’d always had each other.

  Sometimes the lack was like a great ragged hole in his guts, other times it was worse. He hadn’t believed he could miss her more until yesterday when, for a whole horrifying minute, he had completely forgotten her name.

  The memory gaps were happening more often now. At least he thought they were, but how could he know
for sure? He shook his head as he set the kettle to boil again. Stood to reason, if he could recall that his memory was bad, then it couldn’t be so bad as all that. It was a little patchy, that was all. No big deal.

  He sat at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of tea and picked up the envelope from the Council. It contained details of the home help they were sending to his house. He’d told them he didn’t need any help, thank you kindly. Didn’t want some do-gooder poking around his kitchen, prying in his fridge, handling things. He could manage just fine.

  When the gas main exploded under number 36 flinging slates, bricks and assorted debris high into the night sky, winking across the stars to land in the back gardens and hedges of neighbouring houses, Marvin looked up.

  On the heels of the initial boom of the explosion, the low growl and crackle of fire breathed through his open window. He got up from the table, walked towards the window and blinked slowly. Perhaps the street would be back to normal when he opened his eyes, but when he did, he found himself looking straight into the face of the woman across the street. Both her and the baby were staring straight back at him, framed in their window, while fire splashed lurid orange light over the houses.

  Lights were going on up and down the street now. People were emerging, bewildered in their nightclothes, stumbling over slippers; drawn towards the fire, they still looked to each other and raised their hands to their mouths, hoping someone else would know what to do. Marvin pulled on his bathrobe and went outside. The crowd milled and clustered, and stepped over the smouldering remnants of exploded house strewn around the street. He was standing at the edge of the crowd when he felt a tug at his sleeve. The baby giggled and tugged again, his chubby hand clasped a handful of Marvin’s bathrobe while his mother was busy talking to a woman with long grey braids wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. Marvin held out a finger and the baby grasped and pulled it towards his mouth.

  ‘Hungry are you, buddy?’ he asked the baby conspiratorially. ‘That what keeps you up at night?’ At the sound of his voice, the mother turned her head towards him and narrowed her eyes. ‘I always see your light on,’ Marvin smiled. She didn’t respond. ‘Your bedroom light,’ he said, wondering again if she spoke English. She raised her eyebrows and drew her baby towards her. ‘Not that I’m watching you or anything,’ Marvin raised his hands in a gesture of reassurance. ‘Nothing like that.’ As the woman backed away to the other side of the crowd, he heard the lonely howl of approaching sirens, drawing closer.

  The fire engines blasted into the street, a controlled explosion of red paint and blue lights, scattering the residents before them. Firefighters jumped out wearing dayglo jackets and helmets with visors. The police arrived and set about crowd control.

  ‘Move back, please. For your own protection. Stay back.’ A kid in uniform herded them across the street, away from the burning building. ‘Sorry,’ he told them, ‘you can’t return to your homes just yet but if you’ll be patient, we’ll let you know as soon as it’s safe.’

  Finding himself entangled in the docile shuffling of the crowd, Marvin fought his way clear. There must be something he could do to help. Where were the couple that had lived at number 36? Perhaps they were wandering around somewhere dazed and lost, disoriented from the shock, or injured so badly they couldn’t move or call out. Someone should be trying to find them. He set off, looking into gardens, around sheds and behind bushes. The cold air poked chill fingers into the folds of his bathrobe and he realised with a familiar dismay that he needed to go, and soon. It was bad enough at his age without the cold, and it sure wasn’t helping. He glanced around. He needed to find somewhere quickly.

  Marvin edged around a box hedge into a deserted front garden and found a good dark corner. As he stood there, sighing with relief, he looked up at the smoke drifting past the stars. The folks from number 36 had likely been blown up and burnt during the explosion and could even be floating by, within those clouds.

  He was just finishing off when he heard a noise behind him. Startled, he spun round and came face to face with a thin, young woman with lank hair, holding a baby. There was something familiar about her. She looked at him and her eyes dropped to his crotch where his hand still flapped and jerked as he attempted to tidy himself back into his pyjama pants.

  Her eyes widened in shock for a second then narrowed and her mouth twisted sideways. She pushed a breath out through her nose and turned away. Marvin understood well enough what she meant.

  ‘No. It isn’t…I wasn’t…It’s a tremor…’

  Marvin tried to explain but she was already gone. He started to follow and his foot came down on something soft. Oh crap. Please, not dog shit on my slippers, he thought. He looked down and gently lifted his foot.

  There on the garden path was a human hand, lying palm up, open, like a strange pale flower in the dark. It had been severed at the wrist but was otherwise intact. By the size of it, and the rings, he could tell it was a woman’s hand, must be Mrs 36’s. It was her left hand, Marvin noted. He felt a little dizzy as he stood staring at it, wondering what he should do. The ring finger bore an engagement ring and a wedding band, grown slightly too tight over the years and digging into the flesh, the same way Kath’s rings had. He remembered the way her hands had lain open on the bedspread, pleading for relief, even as the warmth left her body. And there had been nothing, not one goddamned thing, he could do for her.

  Maybe he should pick the hand up but he didn’t want to touch it. In any case, he reasoned, you weren’t supposed to move a body so probably you shouldn’t move pieces of them either. He went to the edge of the garden and looked around, hoping to find someone official nearby, but there was no one. He could see the fire was being brought under control, the flames sinking lower behind the black shadow-puppet silhouettes of his neighbours.

  Perhaps he should call for help. He cleared his throat. ‘Help?’ he tried, but his voice sounded thin and papery. ‘Help!’ he tried again, but the word jammed in his throat and crushed itself, like it was too big to get out.

  As Marvin debated the matter, the hand lay passively on the ground, the fingers curled inwards slightly, lines on the palm picked out by the fading orange light. As he gazed at it, he felt strangely peaceful. Like the scent of some macabre night-blooming flower, the hand released a hypnotic innocence, a frank helplessness that both charmed and troubled him.

  Time passed.

  The yapping of a dog brought Marvin out of his trance. A small tan-coloured terrier was in the garden, padding eagerly towards the hand. Marvin stepped between the hand and the dog. The dog stopped and looked at Marvin with its head cocked to one side for a second but then continued on, trotting around him towards the hand, its pink tongue poking out over white teeth. Marvin put himself between the two again and, before he thought it all the way through, he growled, low and threatening, and finished with a sharp warning bark and a step forwards. The dog whimpered and backed off out of the garden, then bolted off up the street. Marvin allowed himself a small smile. Not such a helpless old coot after all.

  The hand was still there. He’d have to pick it up. That was the only thing to do. He’d pick it up and take it to somebody official and they could deal with it.

  The wrist end was seared like a Sunday roast. He bent down and grasped the hand firmly by the wrist. It lolled slightly as he lifted it. It wasn’t stiff yet and although it was cool to the touch, it still felt human, real.

  He walked to the edge of the path and hesitated. The whole street was outside, including women and children. He couldn’t just go wandering around with a severed hand in plain sight. He stepped back into the garden and tried putting it in the pocket of his bathrobe but whichever way he put it in, the other end stuck out and would be clearly visible. Then he had an idea.

  Before he could think or change his mind, he tucked the hand inside the elasticated waistband of his pyjama pants, and knotted the cord of his bathrobe tightly over the wrist. He could feel the cool palm and soft fingers resting against the
skin of his stomach but it didn’t feel bad. The hand was good and secure and wouldn’t be upsetting anyone there.

  Marvin left the garden and walked back towards the dying fire. All he had to do was find someone in a uniform and explain the situation. Simple.

  He was only a few steps away from the crowd when he felt the hand begin to slip. He slowed to a shuffle and tightened the cord on his bathrobe again. But it was too late. Just as he reached the crowd it skidded down further, then stopped. Had things been just a little different, thought Marvin, if a few specific details could’ve been adjusted, a woman’s hand down there would have been welcome.

  His shoulders slumped as he looked at the firemen, continuing to pour gallons of water onto the blackened, smoking ruins of number 36. People were bustling about being efficient with clipboards. ‘You can go back to your homes now,’ a voice announced. ‘The gas is off so it’s perfectly safe. If you could all clear the area.’

  Marvin didn’t move. He was worried the hand would slip again, drop down the leg of his pyjama pants and out the other end. The other residents started to drift away in ones and twos, back to their own homes. One of the firemen was looking at Marvin.

  ‘Alright there, mate?’ he asked. ‘You lost?’

  ‘Um, no, not exactly,’ muttered Marvin. He wanted to tell them, but the prospect of fishing the hand from inside his pyjama pants in the middle of the street seemed like a very bad idea.

  This wasn’t the way he’d imagined things would work out. The ambulance doors slammed and the driver switched the lights off and started the engine. They must have the rest of what was left of the couple from number 36 in there. Perhaps he could run after them, tell them they’d dropped a bit. But before he could form a plan, the ambulance was driving out of the street.