the tenancy agreement: chapter 6

1974

November

Exhausted, Lucas is asleep, entwined around his sister on a bare single mattress, stuck together like a single person, hiding their victim souls behind skinny limbs and bruises, behind eyelids too determined to keep up. Their skin is crusted with dirt, mottled like tiger pattern, like poorly applied tanning sauce, flecked with the alt brown of dried blood rich against the cracking dust lines. Across the room their mother sits, her hollow eyes locked vacant in space, her body so still like an artefact, a Vesuvian unearthing, life sucked out of this inadequate shell, this paean to the tangible earth, and leaving only the unmoving, the burnt out tissues behind, statued on the ancient furniture. The silence beats an oppressive rhythm, fizzing into its own existence, the unimaginable orchestra of particles and molecules and atoms blaring their noiseless movements, like dust mites and hair bits and the sound of the turning earth creaking, the skirting boards groaning into life. Burst by hoarse laughter the door opens up. Mother doesn’t move a fraction. Lucas and Tanya still asleep. Dad and his pub friend, reeling slightly on their feet, they reek of pints – of best – and chasers, house scotch, the shit stuff. The local’s over the road – The Rising Sun, a wallpapered den of barely concealed violence, a pivotal point in some cycle of hate, its beer pumps and optics perpetually reinforcing the decay, the breakdown, the permanence of it all, this horror, its fixed misery dripping off the walls like damp, the bright electric light bulbs bringing every vein and scar and memory vividly to life. Every day the same punters, same handful of domestic abusers, consoling each other for their busted knuckles, idolising each other for their tales each more grotesque – and true – than the last. Like veterans of an ageless war against familial responsibility and tender feeling they bond tightly among the dart boards and ashtrays, finding approval and justification both in the gammon face of the landlord; they virulently condone each other’s cruelty, baptise themselves in booze and bar snacks, apostles of their own patriarchal church of unchecked testosterone. Every day the same two women peddling their very genitals for loose change, done up quickly, thickly, the buttery make-up not hiding their screams so loud inside, their fleshy thighs mottled with cellulite tributaries, nails smoke yellow, dry hand-jobs conducted on bar stools (landlord doesn’t mind – he WATCHES), blow jobs in toilet cubicles – or a fiver a fuck but the car park for that, standing pressed up against the wire fence, hammered joylessly with the breathy violence that breeds in these men’s homes, left with knickers round knees picking coins – all silver – off the floor in the weak light from the frosted toilet window, and they’re laughing about it in the pub, and another one’ll be out in a minute for his turn, wipe yourself up and start over.

Dad ignores mother, rubs his hand together, stops in his tracks when he sees the kids. His hands stop rubbing, his face turns, his mate – say Steve – is grinning, gormless, everything about his presence just a lewd blot, pulsing with crude sexualized gesture – unfiltered by the acceptable, the decent.

“What the fuck is this?” says Dad, his arms by his sides like ornaments, fists clenched at the bottom of them.

“Better not be her,” says Steve through a sighed belch, revelling in his own recycled beer stench. “Tol’ me she were young – s’how I want her. Not like this fackin mess.”

Snapped: “Does that look like my fucking daughter?”

“Thass it then?” he says, gesturing to the mattress with a perceptible grind of his pelvis. “Tell me thass it. I’ll ‘ave a slice a that.” His face contorts in the delight of potential intercourse. Dad is looking at the mattress, the sleeping kids, features angry, eyes distracted.

“Show me the money first you filthy bastard.”

Steve pulls a scrunched five pound note out from his grimy jeans, the denim torn below the pockets, the blue-white of their insides hanging out over the leg. He holds it up so Dad can see it but doesn’t hand it over.

“Thass it,” he says again, smiling like a shit. He’d done some time for sex offences but carried on all the same. Women didn’t get his sense of humour. The blokes in the pub called him Injunction Steve. He was always the last to fuck the pub hooker, felt the sperm of five other men drip down his balls while she impatiently coaxed him along to finish. When he closed his eyes he saw disembodied vaginas – no respite – depersonalized female genitals, parts otherwise absent from the whole, just endless vulvas without the need for consent, conversation, apology. His perceptual inability to humanise female sex organs made him dangerous long before ViSOR and Injunction Steve was a free man. The more things change the more they stay the same. “Sweet little cunt,” he goes on. “Taste like sugar. You’ve had a taste? Tell me it tastes sweet.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“You dirty bastard, you ‘ave. Don’t blame you, neither. Lovely thing like that – I’d fuck it if it was me own grandchild.”

“Didn’t I tell you to show me the money?” Dad is still looking at the mattress, his face purpling up, neck all tendon and stretched skin.

“I shown you the money, five sheets, right here.” He holds the note up like the grail. “It’s yours. And you can watch if you like.” He’s idly thumbing the end of his dick through his jeans.

“Five.” He still hasn’t turned to see the money, hasn’t moved.

“This is alright, is it? You don’t mind?”

“What?” says Dad, shaking his head from his reverie, looking at Steve. Mother’s just sat there. Always is. “No.” Her eyes point onwards but she doesn’t see a thing. “Give me that money.” He takes the fiver and pockets it.

“Righto. You gonna wake it up then?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s that it’s with then? Boyfriend?”

“No.” Frowning like his face will cave in. “Brother.”

“Her brother?” Steve’s laughing in pub tones, overplayed disbelief. “Fuck me, what kinda house is this? Brothers fackin sisters? Jesus wept. You wanna keep an eye on them two mate. They’ll be growing up like a couple a them perverts, keep on fackin each other like this.”

“You what?” His dead voice pierces the life of Steve’s oratory. Injunction Steve. Oblivious Steve.

“They’re at it – right under your fackin nose. In your house. Broad fackin daylight. Yeah, you wanna watch it alright mate. Knock it right on the ‘ead.”

Dad’s face twitches a bit. Joke’d a been fine in the pub but not here. Not in his house. His red face is so red it looks like paint against his moon-white chest. Best of British.

“Perverts,” says Steve in a conspiratorial half-whisper, dumbly relishing his little fuckabout.

Quick smart Dad yanks Steve forward by one shoulder and throws a fist into the middle of his face. Bone pops and he lumbers backwards.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” Dad says.

“You mad cunt you broke my – “

Dad hit him again, kicked him when he hit the floor, pulls him back up to his feet and drags him out of the room. He pulls the front door open.

“Filthy sonofabitch,” says Bloodyface Steve, Injunction Steve. “I know what you are.”

“Get out.”

“Least I do it to other people’s daughters.”

“Get. Out.”

“What about my money?”

Dad slams the cheap door to rattling. It’s woken up Tanya and Lucas, their eyes locked tight frightened in recognition, bodies frozen to the mattress by the inevitable. Dad’s footsteps are rushing back to the room and his shoulder drunkenly reels into the doorframe as he tries to get through it.

“Y’bastards.” He growls the words out in one drawn out syllable, like his tongue’s been slashed.

He rushes over to the mattress and grabs Lucas, Tanya screaming for him to stop it, and pulls him up off the floor, cut arms pinned by his sides. The boy can only kick his legs. The futility of it makes him want to scream. Tanya is punching Dad in the back but he doesn’t let go.

“What do you think you were doing to her?” he shouts in Lucas’s ear, his breath like hot poison condensing against his face. “You don’t fucking touch her.”

“I didn’t. We were just sleeping.” Resigned to the certain destiny of the present. No pleading, no apology. It was all already happening.

“Don’t you tell me what you were doing.”

“I wasn’t, I was...”

“You’re perverts. Perverts showing me up.”

Tanya’s still punching him, although too weak to hit him hard. She feels like a kid. Under her limp fists his back is like something out of an abattoir, just a fleshy memorial – ancient! forgotten! – to his own distant humanity, linked only in genes, and form, and bone structure, and muscle definition, only in the most physical ways. Not a man by any other account. Not alive. Being. He was, nothing more – with all the meaninglessness that went with it.

“Put him down,” she screams.

Mother is rocking slightly, back and forth, metronomic, counting time with the dull beat of Tanya’s fists, her eyes unmoving and fixed blind in their sockets, face caught in a weird grin that might just be a muscle reflex. Dad is trembling with rage.

“You don’t fucking touch her,” he says. “You need to learn some manners. Some respect.”

“I didn’t touch her.”

“Don’t you hurt him,” says Tanya, her dark hair plastered to her forehead in sweaty strands. Her voice is weary too, accepting. She accepted what she knew would come.

“You’re both disgusting, the pair of you. Pair of fucking animals. You enjoy it did you?” He shakes Lucas like a doll, snapping his neck back. “Putting it in her? Enjoy it?”

“I didn’t put it in her.”

“Fucking liar! Did you enjoy it?”

“I didn’t...”

“Didn’t think so. Isn’t much fucking good for nothing is she. Dry like a desert, little slut, fucking whore, bitch cunt.” He’s crying and pouring sweat. “Dishing herself out like she’s a fucking public convenience.”

Tanya jumps a foot or so off the ground and punches her father in the back of the head, which stops his tirade short and leaves the room hollow with the empty silence of domesticity, punctuated only by mothers rocking. The room aches with it. Dad smiles at Lucas. There’s blood on his teeth. Must have bit his tongue when she punched him. Without even looking at her he swings Lucas’s whole body into the sharp corner of the wall which protrudes out for the fireplace, the very house conspiring against them – a double-fronted accessory to violence, revelling in its collusion, the awful finality of its assaultive involvement. Then crack, or snap like a piece of wood. His spine takes the force of the collision. Inside he screams thunder but nothing leaves his lips. Dad let’s go and he falls face down to the carpet and feels nothing but his brain. Why does he feel nothing? Brain keeps asking, like a deranged quizmaster. Dad swings his fist behind him and hits Tanya’s face hard, hits her over. She feels a tooth loose.

“Tanya,” says Lucas. “I can’t move. Oh Jesus. I can’t feel anything.”

“It’ll be okay,” she says.

“Why won’t my brain shut up?”

Dad picks a small length of wood up from the floor, piled with other rubbish. Tanya rushes out of the door.

“You need discipline,” says Dad. He’s standing over Lucas, whose brain keeps feeling. Why my brain why my brain? Dad swings the wood down onto Lucas’s back, six seven nine times, laughing too. Lucas watches the wood hit his flesh but doesn’t feel it. Feels nothing. Just his brain. Like a spectator. Like he’s left his body behind. Like one of those out of body experiences. He realises he is screaming, seconds after he does it, but it’s because it’s so odd. He can’t feel anything. Nothing.

Dad doesn’t hear Tanya come back into the living room. Why would he, engrossed, spent, drained like he shot his load, looking down at Lucas with triumph drawn all over his face, drawn right into its lines and wrinkles? Doesn’t hear her footsteps over his own deep breaths. She’s carrying a long Phillips head screwdriver. Sticks it into his back, in right up to the yellow plastic handle. His face contorts with it, agonized rubber, she thinks. She pulls it back out slowly. He clutches at his stomach ineffectually and turns slowly around, blood on his lips. Lucas looks up at them, his eyes don’t blink, he doesn’t speak a word. Mother rocks some. The wound is bleeding heavily, bits of flesh or something are stuck to the tip of the screwdriver, and he drops the wood and tries to put his hand on it. Compress! He lunges at Tanya and she sticks him again, in the chest, sounds like slicing meat as it goes through, grinding on a rib. Fucking pork. He goes down like a felled tree, nothing big or impressive. The tumble is an anticlimax after sixteen years, she thinks. More blood out of his mouth but he’s still trying to kick his legs and flap his arms. She sits slowly on his chest, her thighs restraining his weakened arms, and she stabs him in a frenzy, over and over, tens of tens of times, through the chest, the gut, completely silent as she does it. Mother starts rocking faster with the tempo of the stabbing. Lucas looks on, acutely aware of his brain, that he can feel his brain. That’s not normal, he thinks. Dad’s breathing is whistling through fucked pipes, Tanya’s hands are dripping with his blood. She lifts the screwdriver over her head and drives it into his neck. It crunches through his windpipe like teeth through breakfast cereal. There’s a lot of blood, red with certainty.

Tanya gets up without a word and leaves the room again. Lucas is still. Mother’s stopped rocking and is gazing at nothing. Tanya comes back – holding a claw hammer, slender metal. She stands in front of her mother’s chair, puts a hand on her cheek.

“Mum,” she says. “Look at me, mum.” The cheek is cold under her bloody hand. Mother’s eyes don’t move. She doesn’t speak. “Mum,” says Tanya again. “Just fucking look at me.” She doesn’t. Tanya looks at Dad’s body and feels peace. She looks at Lucas and knows he is paralysed. Paraplegic. She looks at the hammer in her hand. She rests the flat side of the hammer’s head against the peak of mother’s brow, lines it up, ever the perfectionist, then lifts it to arm’s length and cracks it down heavy into the centre of her head. Mother falls off of the chair to the right and Tanya starts a little, starts at this or any other life ending so much more quickly than it could ever begin, starts at the sound of skull-bone cracking. Eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. She lays the hammer down by the body and goes over to Lucas.

“I can’t feel myself,” he says. She strokes his hair and comforts him, dark red streaks left down the side of his face like war paint. She kisses his cheek, then they kiss again, each other, with mouths, two mouths, heads spinning, properly kissing, mouth on mouth, multi-lipped, his and hers, passionately – is this what passion feels like? like a massive relief? – like out of the cinema, like the lovers they never were. She rolls him onto his back and he flops over, his body flaccid and malleable, stripped of feeling, and she rubs her hand over the lifeless crotch – injustice itself speaks through the eternally static genital of the paralysed youth – of his jeans, sits straddling him, kids older than their years, kisses him again on the mouth, moves her hand up his chest.

“I can’t feel anything,” he says.

“I know.” She whispers it for fear of disturbing the strange intimacy. He has bloody handprints on the chest she kisses from neck to waistband.