the tenancy agreement: chapter 14

2005

November

Tanya was still in the armchair. The others all back in their seats. Semi-circular silence. She’d wiped some of the blood from her face onto a tea towel which she’d left on the floor next to her. The tea towel had a faint smell of week old lager. There was still a red sheen on her face like the remnants of artificial dyes from cheap face paints. She seemed to have calmed down. Breathing settled and staring straight ahead. She’d speak when she was ready. It was one hell of a trauma. They’d turned the overhead light on. The gravity of the situation seemed to demand it. Made the room feel like a waiting room on the platform of a train station, tiled floor and metal benches set behind thick painted wooden doors punctuated with reinforced glass windows. Tense. Hostile. Waiting for something to happen. Greg looked at his phone, then at the others. Pleading eyes. Couldn’t phone the police. Couldn’t have the police sniffing round. But then look at her. So ask her to leave or what? Get her to phone her family? What, like Lucas? Where was her dead brother? They had to get her out. It wasn’t their responsibility. She wasn’t. But fucking look at her.

“Do you think Joe’s okay?” said Greg. How long had it been? Half an hour? Twenty minutes? Less than that. What did he think he was going to do round there? “I thought he’d be back by now.”

Ezra looked at his phone. He looked worried. Craned his head back towards the window but the curtains were shut. Wouldn’t have seen anything.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said. Voice quiet with the weakness of disbelief. Looked at the phone again. “I’m sure he is.” Any semblance of certainty shafted by self-serving repetition.

“He’s probably forgotten what he went for,” said Tom. Sat forward in his seat. Hands on his knees. “You know Joe.”

“He’ll be back in a bit,” said Jonathan.

Speculation pierced by Tanya laughing loudly. Haw haw haw, a startling burst. They all four turned to look at her, Ezra’s mouth even slightly open. The damned social inappropriateness of it, the laughter. And in an anxious room. And fuck, the volume of it. She turned her head slightly to look at them, saw their expressions. Laughter stopped as quickly as it had started, and she sat calm once again.

“He’s dead.” She said it levelly, matter-of-fact. An observation of unquestionable, empirically verifiable certainty. A consensually accepted truism.

Ezra caught all of their eyes. This was getting wrong.

“What?” said Greg.

Tanya laughed again. Another machine gun burst, erratic, loud. Erupted uncontrolled from her swollen cut lips. Like the offset of psychosis or a terrible illness. She sounded insane. Ezra knelt down next to her again, returned his damp palm to her knee.

“Tanya?” he said. “What did you just say?”

“He’s dead. Joe’s dead.”

“What do you mean? Talk to me.”

“I am talking. He’s dead.”

Ezra stood up. Rubbed his hand over his moustache, his beard. It made a rough sound.

“You mean your husband... is Joe going to be okay over there?” He pointed to the window. “Is your husband...”

“He’s dead,” she said. Not looking at Ezra when she spoke. Like her eyes were closed, even with the lids up.

“Tanya?” Greg pushed Ezra to one side, towered over her. “Tanya? Listen to me. Who the fuck’s dead?”

“Joe. Joe’s dead.” Their raised voices made hers even slower, more measured. Spoke like something from a dream.

“How do you know that?” said Greg.

She was still looking straight ahead, straight through them, through history and life. The cut on her chest had stopped bleeding. Greg thought of Lucas and of Tanya. That horrible surprise on his face when the typewriter came down. The darkness of her imagined genitals. Scarred arms marking the unbearable passage like crosses on a calendar. A whole lifetime. What inconceivable horror. Ticking off the days. My body is a timepiece. Vividly recording the reliability of my decay. Until finally YES! Reborn! Out of life and into death! Born into death! Empty endless irresponsible death! The first and last consensual act of life is death. Thrust screaming uncertain into the world we leave it with the certainty of what we will face. Nothing.

“Did you think you’d get away with it?” she said. Eyes fixed.

Greg and Ezra looked at each other. Ezra’s face dropped. Paled behind the red-tinged beard. Mouth went slack.

“With what?” said Greg. “Tanya?”

“With what you’ve done.”

“We don’t know what...”

“He’s dead.”

“Shit,” said Tom. Something made him back up towards the wall. Spine pressed against the wooden edge of the mantelpiece.

“There’s evil through life,” she said. She rocked just gently. Her face made tiny twitches. Involuntary electrical impulses. Eyes bloodshot and teary. Blinked slowly. Isolated tears fell weighted down her blood smeared cheeks. “Everywhere you look. Even houses. In the bricks they’re made of. In the way they’re built. Just terrible doom.”

“Oh shit,” said Tom again.

“Shut her up,” said Jonathan.

“It spills into the people,” she said. Her lip was quivering as she spoke and there were many tears but she was composed like she hadn’t noticed.

“This isn’t good,” said Tom.

“Shut up,” said Greg.

And Tanya thought back. Her mother sitting immobile clutching the arms of the chair. Screaming a wretched deafening scream. Eyes and mouth stretched wide with the effort. Just screaming.

“Lucas and I,” said Tanya. “We lived here.”

And her mother was slapping herself across the face, scratching it, thin skin splitting, tearing chunks of hair loose from the scalp. From her screams came words, chanted over and over with a hoarse grotesque voice. Such blood from the scratches. Words formed like a gestating ancient language. A guttural response to stimuli and sculpted into meaning. Grunted out without breath. “DREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVER”. The aching refrain of the dead Bobby Darin’s literally broken heart. The soundtrack of a collapsing mind. This yelped psychosis.

Ezra and Greg had edged away from Tanya and Tom was pacing on the other side of the room, hands clasped tight together. Jonathan had sat back down, too afraid to stand. No Joe. No Conor.

“What the hell is she doing?” said Tom.

“I’ll handle this,” said Ezra, holding his hand up. “Tanya? Everything’s going to be okay. You’ve had a terrible shock tonight.”

“Shock?” said Tom. “She knows. She fucking knows.”

“No, Tom, she’s had a shock. That’s all.” Look at that look. Fucking firm look. Her eyes still trained straight ahead. All of time in an instant.

“I know,” she said.

“Tanya,” said Greg softly. He leaned into her with delusions of comfort. Real fast she drew a knife up and dragged it hard across Greg’s forearm. He screamed when the blade pierced into the flesh. Watched it part like the smile of a sliced melon. Greg swung himself away from the knife, clutching his arm and pushing the flesh closed, and Ezra reared backwards with him. “Jesus,” said Greg.

“Shit stop it,” said Ezra. Stumbled on the edge of the blanket they’d laid over the bloodstain.

Tanya stood up from the chair, knife held out in front of her. Slashing it towards them. Grinning dumbly at their cowardice.

“Fucking bitch stabbed me,” said Greg.

“Not useful,” said Ezra. Hands held up. An empty nod to truce.

“Fuck you,” said Greg. Arm pissing blood straight through his clutched fingers.

“Fuck no one.” Ezra looked at Tom when said it.

“This is too much,” said Tom.

“Get her out of here,” said Jonathan.

“I know,” she said. Weirdly calm sounding given the circumstances.

“Shit,” said Tom.

She lunged at Greg and Ezra point first. Missed the stab and Greg impulsively punched her in the back of the head. Face glazed in sad surprise. Taut with confusion. She fell to her knees and he punched her again, in the face, fist arced wide in preparation. Tits hit the floor with the rest of her. Bloody spit in the corner of her lips. She was loosely conscious. Again Greg pushed the two halves of the wound together.

“That’ll do for Christ’s sake,” said Ezra. “We don’t want to kill her too.”

“Now what?” said Tom.

Jonathan jerked his eye across the accumulated shit left all over the room. There was a piece of rope Joe had found somewhere, too good to leave. He threw it to Ezra.

“What do you want me to do with this?” he said.

“Tie her up,” said Jonathan.

“Great, hostage taking. And murder.”

“We’re the fucking hostages,” said Greg, trying to tie a sports sock around his arm. A Daz-rinsed tourniquet. A primark medical aid. Pulling the toe end with his teeth. “And stop going on about murder.”

“She knows anyway. She said she knows.”

“Maybe she was bluffing.”

“She wasn’t fucking bluffing,” said Ezra.

“Just tie her up,” said Jonathan. “It’ll buy us some time if nothing else.”

Greg and Ezra heaved her onto a wooden dining chair and tied her wrists together behind her back, then to the chair and to her ankles. Tom picked the knife off the floor and threw it behind the TV. Tanya blinked herself to awareness. Felt the rope on her wrists.

“Ropes?” she said. “This what you’re into Ezra? Gent in conversation, animal in the bedroom?”

Ezra folded his arms. “No,” he said. So proudly. Moral paragon etched onto his future headstone.

“Pity,” she said. Turned to Greg. “How about you? You like to see a woman bound? In your control? Doing exactly what you say? Is that the way you like it?”

He tried not to look at the shape her body made between her legs. The gaps and the declivities. The imaginable feel of her cunt in his mouth. Not a good time.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Beats getting stabbed.”

“Stabbed? That was a scratch. Your friend Joe – he knows what a stabbing is.”

Greg slapped her once in the face. Split her lip anew. Caught it on his ring. She looked surprised, ran the tip of her tongue over the blood. Smiled as she did it. Ezra pushed Greg back, eyes narrowed with admonitory mirth.

“Hit me again Greg,” she said. “Be a man. What about you Tom? Jonathan? I bet you two want to touch me. If you could stop touching each other.”

“What the fuck have you done to Joe?” Greg shouted the question like a punk lyric.

“I haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’ve been here with you.”

“Tanya,” said Ezra. “I know you’re angry, and you may have a right to be, but just tell us where Joe is.”

“Angry? Why would I be angry? Because you killed my brother?”

“Where’s Joe?” He spat by mistake. He had started crying but he didn’t seem upset.

“I told you already.”

“Where?”

“He’s dead,” she said. Newsreader cool.

“You fucking...” Greg had balled his fist and drew it back but Ezra restrained him, both hands flat on his chest.

“Take it easy Greg,” he said.

“Take it easy? She said Joe’s dead.”

“How would she know if he was? She’s been sitting right here.”

“Oh he is dead,” she said. “Lucas did it.”

They all stopped in their tracks. Like the world just ended. Somehow it felt inevitable. No fresh starts. No clean breaks. Everything will always fuck you in the end.

“Lucas?” said Tom. Cleared his throat. Mocked by breathlessness. Buried alive inside these cheap painted walls. Upturned ashtrays his eternal pillow. Death shroud denim. He felt his lip moving of its own accord. Animated by the strain. Then both of them. Whipped his mouth up sharp into a grimace and pinched his face up. Did it when he cried too. Quivering bottom set against sneering top. Nerve damage smile.

“You remember Lucas?” she said. “Cripple? Landlord? My brother?”

“Of course. It’s just...”

“Yes?”

“Isn’t Lucas...” It was Greg. Both fists still clenched. Blue eyes soaked in urgent life.

“Is he?” said Tanya.

The dull light of the upright lamp flickered off then straight back on.

“This might be bad,” said Jonathan.

“You could say that, yeah,” said Ezra. Choking years of friendship with mouthfuls of disdain. “One house and two friends missing, presumed fucked. I’d say that’s pretty bad, yes. Shit, even.”

Tanya was giggling. With all the disembodied emptiness of canned laughter. Disconnected from actual.

“I just...” said Tom.

“What?” said Ezra. Snapped out, the cunt.

“I don’t understand why.”

Tanya giggling.

“Oh please. You know what’s happening here as well as she does. We all know. We were all there, weren’t we? We all did it, didn’t we?”

“Fuck, Ezra, he was dead,” said Greg. Blood curdling out of the sock’s fibrous parameters. A shapeless bargain cum spectator to the dying present. “It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, but the man was fucking dead.”

“We. Killed. Him. Do you get that? We killed him.”

The lamp flickered again and left shadows imprinted in instant memory like flash photography. Flickered like it was going to blow out. Tom was gulping in short breaths. He looked at the ceiling in a panic. Tanya was beaming, head angled up to the ceiling too. The other three looked up. Fucking cardboard pillar, a shitty totem.

“What was that,” said Tom. Hissed.

“What?” Greg and Jonathan said it in unison, like simultaneous prayer.

There was creaking from upstairs. The sound of floorboards being walked over. It moved across the whole length of Greg’s bedroom. Definitely footsteps. Even made the lightshade move. They followed the sound with their eyes. Something was up there. Took a few steps then stopped. Then it started again, louder, heavier, like it was fucking running about, just back and forth, one end of the room to the other. Running and stamping its feet.

“No one else is here right?” said Greg.

“Fuck, like who?” said Ezra. More aggressive the more frightened he got.

“Conor?” said Jonathan. Hopeful. Stupid.

Ezra was looking at the ceiling. “I don’t think Conor’s coming back tonight,” he said.

More creaking. Even louder. Fucking sounded like running, to the bedroom door. Heard the whine of hinges. Tom, Greg and Ezra all crept towards the hallway. Crushed by the silence they could hear their own sweat fall. So quiet. Except the creaking floorboards. The door opening. And thumping, getting faster.

“Shit what is that?” said Tom.

Ezra and Greg told him to shut up. Thumping. Things don’t just thump. Fucking hammering.

“Oh fuck,” he said.

“Oh god please be quiet,” said Greg, straining to hear, to find sense in the noise. No one sure who he was talking to.

They were peering out of the door, into the dark hall, bulb long smashed in the drunken revelry they tried never to regret. A light flicked on in one the bedrooms upstairs. They saw the glare grow out of the dark. Still creaking. Still thumping.

“Oh shit guys,” said Tom.

Greg looked back into the corner of the living room where Jonathan was standing. Saw Lucas behind him. Bloody and fucked up. Gnarled and bent in the wheelchair like a tree felled in thunder. Caught a glimpse of him out the corner of his eye. Flashed there like a camera bulb. Like a floater. A zombie speck dashed momentarily in reluctant visual parameters. Grin spread over Lucas’s shit face. A split second thing. Anomalous peripheral vision. Dead Lucas.

“Jesus!” said Greg. He fell backward onto Tom and Ezra. “Get the fuck out of there.”

Jonathan span around to look behind him. Lucas there, Lucas gone. Greg couldn’t take his eyes from the corner. He was panting, fingers clutched to the paint of the door frame. Knew he’d seen it but the corner left empty. Death hung in the room like weird incense. Jonathan too shit scared to move again. Greg mumbling: you see it? It was still dark in the hallway except for the faint light from the upstairs bedroom. Something was wrong. Something else. Jonathan’s eyes jerked to Tanya. Gave him the movement his body wouldn’t. Then to Ezra. Looked to his side.

“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Tom?”

He wasn’t there. Had been right at Ezra’s side but then – right then – he wasn’t there. The thumping from upstairs got faster. Louder. Frantic thumping it swelled under the weight of Tom’s absence.

“Come on,” said Greg, turning to the stairs. He flicked the light switch. Didn’t come on. The predictability would have felt like parody if he hadn’t been so terrified. Ezra was still in the doorway, framed by the viscous light of the living room.

“Keep an eye on her,” he said. To Jonathan.

“She’s not getting up.”

“Just keep an eye on her. Better to be sure.”

“You want me to stay here on my own?” said Jonathan. Red rimmed brown eyes built up to shameless tears. Something about blue jeans made him feel vulnerable.

“Yes. Just for a minute.”

“God.” Tanya was staring at him.

Greg was craning his neck, trying to look up the stairs without going up them. Still the thumping. Fucking neighbours didn’t complain about that.

“Didn’t I ask you to change this fucking light bulb?” he said.

“Where’s Tom?”

“Shut up. I don’t know.”

“Christ,” said Jonathan in the living room. “Where the fuck is he?”

“I want you to shut up,” said Greg. Had to almost shout it over the noise. Trying to peer up. Then a scream. Wretched, hollow, torn out. Terrible. A dying scream. Knew it was Tom before it had even finished. The thumping stopped. The bedroom light flicked off. Greg felt the darkness smother him like cold water.

“Come on,” said Greg. Started climbing the stairs.

“Greg I’m not sure how sensible this is,” said Ezra.

“Fuck sensible. None of this is sensible.”

He was climbing up slowly, one step at a time. Silent sweating. Ezra squirming in discomfort, lingering at the bottom.

“Greg. Come back down here. Maybe it’s better to think about this. Down here.”

“We’ve got to find Tom you bastard. Get up these stairs.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“Shit.” Shouted.

“What? What is it?” Nothing. “Greg? Fuck. Greg?”

Upstairs it fell silent. Except creaking floorboards. They started again in the front bedroom. In Greg’s room. Couldn’t be Greg. Greg was still on the stairs. But it was creaking. Louder. It was fucking footsteps. It must have been. He could hear them.

“Greg?” said Ezra. Traces of panic, like echoes, memories. Still at the bottom, in the hallway. “What the fuck’s going on up there? Greg?” Cocked his ear up but couldn’t hear shit. Just that creaking. “Greg?”

Greg was awkwardly spread on the carpet at the top of the stairs. Tripped over a pile of socks. In his head he blamed Joe as he fell. He picked himself up. Four doors branched off of the landing, all then in darkness, four doors closed. Fuck, he said, to himself. He could hear Ezra calling him, but could hear the creaking floorboards over the top of that. The thumping started again. Quiet first but quickly louder. And a weird kind of slapping sound. Like slapping a wet thigh. Primed buttocks. Leather hand run down the length of dead livestock. Now he was up there it wasn’t clear where it was coming from. Sounded like everywhere. He reached for the handle of the door on the left. Back bedroom. Tom’s. Grown of dead foetus memory, incest, latterly the darkened blow jobs of tender faces, attentively done. And fucking. Thanking each other at the end of it. Greg pushed the door open, turned the light on, peered in. it was empty. He left the light on and walked across the landing to the other back bedroom, opened the door, turned the light on. Empty. Behind him music started abruptly, thrust into life like an alarm clock, blaring out of the room he had just left. It was The Birthday Party. Loud as fuck. Greg rushed back to the room, found the cheap paper lightshade swinging from side to side, as if it had been pushed. Dark rhythmically swallowed the corners of the room with the arc of the swinging light. Left changeable shadows. Made his brain work oddly, disorientated. He grabbed the bulb, screamed at his own burnt fingers. Screamed again at Ezra filling the door. Could see he was speaking but couldn’t hear him over the feedback, just fish lips impatiently chewing the words out. Greg turned the music off.

“What did you find?” said Ezra.

“Nothing.” Greg snapped it. “I was looking but you came up here and scared the shit out of me.”

Ezra’s eyes, pointed over Greg’s shoulder, widened. He instinctively took two steps backwards. Screeched it out: “Greg!”

Greg turned around and Lucas was behind him. Slowly, jerkily standing up from the wheelchair, like a rehabilitated veteran. The chair creaked like dead metal in the crushing silence. Greg’s voice lost to his own fear. Lucas was grinning. One of his eyes almost rotted away. The smile tore his bottom lip off and it hung loosely to his face. The skin sagged off of him like strangers clothes. Digesting itself. He straightened his weak legs. Something horrific about his unfamiliar movements. Ezra watched, paralysed. The irony. Paralysed by a cripples motion. Greg coughed out a scream. Lucas plunged his gloved hand into Greg’s open mouth, clutched onto his tongue, thick slimy muscle he clasped in the ruptured palm of his glove, and started to pull. Greg’s eyes stretched wide he watched it, felt the tongue pulled, saw Lucas’s yellow tinged skin dripping like wax around the cuff of his glove, heard the buckled bones of his legs and spine snapping back into life, tried to scream around the glove, felt his tongue splitting, tearing somewhere awful, felt the rush of blood, rich and meaty, felt it pouring down his throat. Ezra staggered backwards, staggered away. Lucas was silent. No, he was groaning. No, he was laughing. He placed his other hand on Greg’s forehead and gave a certain yank. Pulled the tongue free. A fountain of blood erupted from Greg’s mouth. Ezra could hear him choking on it. Odd how it sounded so full of life. Lucas held the muscle in his hand. It shone like a red trophy. Ezra backed further away. On desperate hands and knees Greg crawled, half sobbing, blood pouring from his mouth, spewing from the severed tongue stump, reached one hand out to Ezra, tried to speak, to plead. Ezra looked at him, at the blood, at Lucas, and he didn’t move. In a flash Lucas leapt onto Greg and pulled him back into the bedroom. He drove his fingers into Greg’s eyes sockets. The globes burst in aqueous humor and vitreous body, jelly liquid mixed with blood and dripping like aspic down Lucas’s probing thumbs. Greg was honking a kind of scream, mustered it from his vocal chords, and Lucas pulled him further into the room by the ankles, then sunk his teeth in Greg’s varying body parts. The fleshy underarm. The throat. Ezra’s face contorted, horrified, and he backed right away, felt the banister on his buttocks before he fell over the top of it, down onto the stairs below, down into the hallway. The bedroom door slammed shut.

Cut forehead but Ezra got straight to his feet. A scratch really. Nearly leapt into the living room.

“Jonathan,” he said oblivious. “We better get out.” Jonathan wasn’t there. Empty corner. Ezra turned in a panic to where Tanya had been sitting. Gone. Rope left in a coiled pile on the floor. chair upturned, her blood printed onto the cheap upholstery in thick neat lines. Ezra crept deeper in and saw Jonathan on the floor, edged behind the TV, like he’d tried to get away. His throat was slit and his stomach carved open, intestines tugged out and spread like display sausages across the window of his torso, onto the carpet around him. Yards of the shit. Ezra screamed and puked. Force of the regurgitation felt oddly relieving. He let it keep coming, retching and retching, gasping his empty gut back out and clutching onto the mantelpiece for support. The creaking and thumping was deafening. Felt like the ceiling’d cave in, the cornices crack like the opening earth to swallow him, blood pouring from the wounded house, the architecture humanised by generations of violence. The lamp flickered on and off. Jonathan dead on the floor. Ezra grabbed at his temples with both hands, trying to squeeze the noise away, then ran out of the house.

Head spinning in the street. There was a light on in the neighbour’s house. What was he supposed to say? He asked himself the question and hammered on their door. Still clutching his head with the other hand. Drown out even the memory. Blood was pooled on his eyebrows from the cut on his forehead. Clothes soaked in the juices of too many people. He was stepping from one foot to the other. Tony opened the door. Warmth, light and soft jazz hit Ezra like a backhand, muffled conversation somewhere in the house. Tony’s mouth dropped, split his face like an unmanned ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Ezra? What in God’s name?”

“Please,” said Ezra. Grabbing both his shoulders with bloody digits. “I need help.”

“What’s happened?” Looking at the blood on his face. His clothes. “Are you hurt?”

“Please. Please let me in.”

“Ezra, we’ve got company. It’s very late.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m in so much trouble.” Balls taut with panic. Blue eyes wide. “Please help me.”

“I can see that Ezra.” Soothing Tony. Man knew how to manage. Practised reassurance. “But this is no time to...”

“Please, I need to come in.”

Ezra pushed past Tony and into the house, straight into the living room. Helplessly drawn to the life of voices, toasting glasses. The mundane sounds of domestic normality. The smell of finished meals. The beating heart of a kind of existence. Barely looked up when he spoke.

“I’m sorry to barge in like this but...”

“Hello Ezra.”

That voice. Ezra stopped in his tracks like he had ceased to be. Dropped to his knees. Smirking legs betrayed him. Lifted his eyes to see it.

Lucas. Lucas in the wheelchair. Not bloody. Not beaten. Not rotting. Not fucked up. Not congealing, decaying, hideous Lucas. Just Lucas. Washed blonde hair spiked in the right gentle places. Tanned face handsome, white tooth smile. Eyes shone in candlelight, in halogen ceiling spotlights. Gloves meticulous. Clothes even more so. It was him alright. Untouched. Glowing with a life Ezra had never seen. Tanya sat next to him. Simple evening dress. No wounds, no blood, no genitals or screaming. She did look beautiful. Soft. They held hands, her index finger folded caressing into his palm. Ezra felt himself crying. Wondered how wet tears could burn his face. When he rolled his eyes upwards he saw a fringe of blood.

“Lucas,” he said. He spluttered. “You’re dead. We...”

They all laughed. Lucas. Tanya. Tony. His wife. Laughed until it was oppressive. Laughed even further. Ezra struggled to his feet, knocked into the coffee table. Red wine spilt. Bottle and two glasses soaking into thick beige shag. Where’s the salt when you need it? Laughter doubled, swelling all the more. Pulsed around him like a growing tumour. The sound given physical properties by its own recurrence. Became a thing itself. Swallowing him in the force of its own audibility. He staggered blindly out of the door, across the hall, into the dining room. Had to blink to get some focus back, and there they were. Five friends gone corpse, propped sitting up around the table like an uncomfortable dinner party. Conor: face lifted off like a manhole and raw muscle where it used to be, but unmistakably him, greying hairs even blood couldn’t hide. Joe: throat hacked open and bled like a pig. Tom: head bludgeoned in and left half the size, skull shattered to sharp thick fragments reminiscent of ancient pottery archaeologically unearthed, a complex jigsaw rich in brain, the whole thing sunk in like a popped balloon. Jonathan: guts left out like worms in the rain, like a carnivorous gastronomic delicacy left to prime, throat so slit the head only just stayed on. Greg: jaw broken two fists wide, mandible hung flapping, hell-red mouth an ancient blood pool, gooey pits where eyes once blinked, chunks of flesh torn toothily from the whole. Each had a glass of wine in front of them, white for Conor – such attention to detail! – and red the rest. Conical party hats in yellow, blue and green had been strapped with elastic to their heads. Tom’s sat uneven, slumping into the crushed remnants of his sagging parietal, the scalp like a loose sheet of turf scuffed up at the corners but draped temporarily over the jagged bone. Ezra screamed again, screamed until his nostrils stung. Backed out of the door and into Tony. He pulled him into the living room. What jolly expressions on their faces! Tony stripped Ezra’s dress off, tore it down the middle, and swept everything off of the coffee table with a stroke of his arm, glasses and Guardian newspapers and TV remotes. He slammed Ezra’s long weak body onto its surface – wood buckling under the impact, splinters in the flesh – and tied his hands up underneath it, table edges cutting into armpits, again into biceps. Lucas and Tanya both applauded. Rapt faces: the pride; the humour; the stimulation.

“Please,” said Ezra. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”

“It’s okay, Ezra,” said Lucas gently.

“Lucas?” said Tony. He was circling the table, his eyes fixed on Ezra. “May I?” Lucas nodded. Tony clapped his hands together, crooked smile drawn over his face. He walked heavily out of the room – there wasn’t the space to run past the antique furniture – but was almost straight back in, carrying a large toolbox and a couple of plastic sheets. Ezra was gasping, trying to catch his failed breath, sobbing. Tony laid the plastic around the edges of the table. The toolbox had a yellow handle.

“Oh God. Please don’t kill me.” Somehow Ezra got the words out. He thought he was going to be sick. He could barely turn his head. Lucas and Tanya were at the wrong end of the table for him to see. Tony’s wife had hitched her skirt up to her waist and had one leg over the arm of the sofa, and had her middle and index fingers in a V around her clitoris. She sunk them into her cunt every time Ezra begged, closed her eyes to really listen with every sob he honked out. “I beg you,” he said. He was still crying.

Tony lifted the catches of his toolbox and took out a thin hacksaw. The tools were meticulously organised. He ran his finger across the blade and nodded approvingly. It had cut into his finger a little. He hoisted up Ezra’s left leg and started to saw into the back of his knee in long even strokes. The ligaments snapped like wet tea towels. Ezra was screaming so loudly. Tony hacked on, arm trembling slightly with the effort, flecks of spatter and skin airbrushed over the tabletop and the sheets of plastic in a wealth of red tones. Lucas turned up anonymous saxophone music to drown out the noise. Tony stopped sawing and dabbed at his brow with the back of his hand, then put the hacksaw down carefully onto the plastic sheet. He knelt down by the toolbox and examined the contents. Settled on the claw hammer. It felt right in his hands, the weight, the arc, the angle, like it was made for him. He looked at Lucas and smiled cheerfully, even thankfully. Lucas was beaming too. A beautiful modern friendship. Tony gently tapped Ezra with the hammer as though he were testing his reflexes, five or six times, each in different places – kneecap, shoulder, fingers, forehead. Weighing up the resistance and the potential.

“Open your eyes please Ezra,” he said, softly drawing the claw end down the length of Ezra’s cheeks. Ezra’s chin was shuddering without control. “Open your eyes.”

“I’d do as he says Ezra,” said Lucas.

“Open your eyes,” said Tony again.

Ezra tried to pry them open. In instinct they had clasped tight shut like molluscs. He couldn’t see properly because his eyes were so teary, his vision drowned beneath their water. His whole body was shaking. Tony held the hammer just above Ezra’s mouth, tapped very gently on his teeth. Ezra could feel the metal on his lips. The weight of it on his teeth was nauseating. He puked a small amount, odd specks foamed out of his mouth and onto the hammer, the rest he swallowed back down. The hydrochloric acid burnt against his throat, fucked over by his own stupid body. Lucas was rubbing his gloved hand up and down Tanya’s leg, inside her thigh, left it lingering around the surface of her cunt.

“Please,” Ezra said. The speech erupted in fits and starts. It sounded involuntary, his body’s last ditch response to stimuli. Snot was pooling out of his flared nostrils. “Lucas. Please.”

“Don’t ask me, Ezra,” said Lucas. Fingers submerged in his sisters genitals. Tony’s wife working her own.

“We had a deal,” said Ezra. His sobs sounded ancient. The hammer was so close to Ezra’s mouth that it was distorting his words.

“No Ezra. No deal.”

Tony’s muscles were primed for death. The hammer caught the lamp light. The hammer came down.