The Chain

The rain is dislodging the dirt from the pores of the city. It is seeping up the legs of his jeans and squelching between his toes, warm like stagnant bath water. He thinks, what the city needs is a plughole. To wash away the filth. People move in the same direction, aqua-planing like cars. Rain rattles the canopy of umbrellas overhead. The clock on a building above his head, unnoticed, says four o’clock, but it isn’t. It’s nine o’clock, and already too late.

He has a face from a Dutch painting, dark and vivid. His eyes are moist like he has been crying or may start, but it’s just the rain. A woman standing in a doorway is trying to hand out leaflets but she’s too far back from the passing throng for anyone to notice. She stands, arm out, frozen. Stephen keeps walking. He crosses a main road, unhurried, into quiet streets. No one needs to be in this part of town at this time of day. He passes council houses, close enough for him to see the shampoo bottles lined up on window sills.

He’d received an email with a video yesterday, a webcam clip. It was poor quality, jerky and blurred. The man, whose name he didn’t know, was sitting off centre. He was wearing a red cap. It was difficult to tell what he looked like. He looked like nobody, indistinct. He had smiled and said, “Stephen? I hope you’re ready for tomorrow.” He drew a cross with his index finger on the middle of his chest.

They’d messaged back and forth, clip clop on the keyboard. Stephen had asked him: what if someone sees us? What if they catch me? And he’d replied: don’t worry. They won’t. Remember that this is a good thing. We are helping each other. Stephen was biting his nails, as he always did. Inspecting them and biting them. He did not bite all his nails equally. He bit the weakest ones the most. Sometimes he bit a nail down so far he had to put a plaster on it to lessen the pain.

Stephen had told him already, the important things.

He couldn’t seem to finish anything these days. He would start doing something, but after a while he’d notice that he wasn’t doing it any more. It wasn’t deliberate. He was thinking about something else. More recently, he was thinking the same thing over and over again, the same unfinished thought.

When he was a boy he used to sleep sometimes in his mother’s bed. He’d lie facing the warm wall of her back, green light from the alarm clock pooling on her shoulder. Sometimes she’d roll over onto him in the night. He liked this, lying half underneath her as though she was an upturned stone. She seemed happy then, in the darkness. When she woke up the tears would start.

He knew this. He understood.

At traffic lights the buses sigh to one another. Stephen knows he shouldn’t have a knife in his jacket pocket. It has torn the lining of his coat. If he rolls his shoulders forward he can feel the tip of it press the skin on his chest. He thinks about tripping over and falling on it. Stephen remembers the last thing that he said in the video clip, as he was reaching to turn the camera off, suddenly in sharp focus. He said, “Even if I run away, follow me and do it anyway. Please.”

He knows it’s him by the red cap. The red cap means it has to be him, even though he thinks it can’t be. He looks too old. He takes the cap off when he sees him, and holds it out like he’s asking for money. He’s too old. He’s smiling but it’s lost in the blur of his features. His skin, hair and teeth are tending towards the same colour; the colour of old paper, of treasure maps and love letters. He doesn’t look like he will bleed much, like there is much blood in him. Stephen wills him to turn away. Stop looking at me. He turns off the path, so he will approach him from a different angle, unsighted. The man puts the cap back on and starts walking away, slowly, waiting for someone to catch up. The park is empty, green and grey under the white sky. Stephen repeats to himself: do it anyway, do it anyway.

The rain has stopped but feels unfinished. The air is warmer now and still humid. The water leaves tide marks on his jeans as they dry. Stephen knows what to do. They went through it many times. He strips down to a T-shirt and puts his jacket into his bag. He thinks, how lucky that the rain has stopped. Then he walks back into town, to the place he knows the waste disposal lorry will be.

When he gets home he wakes up the computer and types in his password. Then he writes: I did it. The response comes back quickly. The other person has been waiting. Number three: wow. How do you feel? Stephen thinks about this. OK. He smiles and writes: it was easier than I thought. It was like Manhunt. There is a muffled banging from downstairs. Number three writes: awesome. The chain has started.

The agreement was to do it within a week. Number one had felt that this was important, to maintain momentum. He picked people from chat rooms, scoured the net for the right people for the group. The idea was simple. First in, first out. So far there were only five of them but they talked of everlasting chains. He told them: this is for people who are young and brave, who want to experience something before they die. People who are numb and want to feel. Imagine slipping away like an old person falling asleep, feeling nothing. The taste of weed killer in your mouth or the smell of petrol fumes in your nostrils. Vomiting. Writing notes. Or even worse, messing it up, getting it wrong. The shame. Far better to do it this way. Number one said: this way people will remember you without blaming you. This is better for everyone. Stephen understood that better than any of them.

Now he is waiting. He listens for cars, looks at newspapers. Each morning he opens the curtains, surprised to confront the same, quiet scene. There is nothing. The man in the red cap is lost, subsumed in the vastness of the city. He does not warrant a front page. In fact there is an article, but it’s too small, lost in the print. It says only that the body of a forty-five year-old man was found in a park. Stephen’s skin prickles with the desire to tell someone what nobody noticed. In the end the man didn’t struggle, didn’t even look at him. He wants to share this. He sort of lay down, almost before the first blow. Stephen wonders whether he would be able to do the same. His arms feel strong. He looks at the computer screen but he hasn’t written anything in days. Each time he looks there is the same thing. Number three: when?