The Killing Lessons (21 page)

Xander was deep in a fever. Not that he knew it. As far as he was concerned what was happening to him was just a newly gimmicked version of what had been happening for years. There were periods when he was almost convinced he was in bed at the farmhouse: there was the window with its curtains half-drawn; there was the muted TV (it annoyed him, vaguely, that an episode of
Real Housewives of Orange County
was beyond his focus); there was the wardrobe’s exposed mirror, taunting him with its not-quite accurate reflection. But every time he started to feel certain of his surroundings the shapes would shimmy, shift away, dissolve, and other realities would take their place. The basement at Mama Jean’s. No window and the shivering strip-light that buzzed. The front yard he was only allowed into on weekends. The crazy tree. The bedroom where they did the lessons.

Mama Jean was tall and shaped like a pear. She wore her pale jeans high up. The big curve from her belly to between her legs was soft and heavy. Leon had to force himself not to look at it. There was something about it that made him want to press his hands there. Some of the veins in her feet were fractured purple lightnings.

The alphabet chart had slipped from Xander’s bed. He’d fallen asleep with his hands resting on it, but now it lay on the floor, half unfolded. He remembered the unmeasurable time after they’d found him wandering in the woods that day. How he hadn’t let go of his backpack, the feeling he’d had that if he let go of it something terrible would happen. Then one soft-spoken woman with short blond hair and a smiling face very gently unlocking his fingers’ grip and opening it up. Oh, I see you brought supplies. That was a smart thing to do, wasn’t it? A half-eaten apple. A banana. Potato chips. A jar of peanut butter. His mouth had been too dry to eat, after a while. And what’s this? she’d asked, unfolding the chart, carefully. She’d gone quiet. As if she knew. But how could she? They hadn’t wanted him to keep it. But when she’d tried to take it – for safe keeping, she said – he’d screamed and hit out at her.

He stared down at it now, while its objects and letters did their maddening dance.

‘Again,’ Mama Jean said. ‘Start again. Just do them one at a time. You’re all jittery. That’s why you keep mixing them up.’

This was the gentle phase. It always started like this, her voice quiet and low. Leon’s face filling with heat and an ache in his eyes where the tears should be, but never were. The pictures on the chart were in bright colours. The balloon was blue. The apple red. The hammer had a light brown handle and a big silver head. Leon knew it was hopeless. The letters and their names came apart in him. The black lines that formed them fell away from each other and swirled slowly, formed new shapes, fell apart again.

‘I know you’re trying,’ Mama Jean said. ‘I can see it in your face. I know you’re scared, too. What are you so scared of?’

She always asked him this. As if she didn’t know. She sounded as if she really
didn’t
know, as if this hadn’t happened, in exactly this way, all those times before. Her voice was so gentle and she was so mystified it made him wonder if it really
had
happened before. Had he dreamed it? It made him look at her, which in turn made her look somewhere else, out the window or into the smoke rippling from her cigarette. He knew looking at her was a bad idea, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was as if it was what she’d been waiting for.

‘Now you’re not concentrating,’ she said, her face turned away, sunlight from the window making two coins of her glasses. ‘Now you’re just trying to make me lose my patience.’

When she said that (Leon didn’t know what ‘patience’ was, except that it was some invisible thing that he somehow made go away from her, like a dog that had caught the smell of something from another room and trotted off to find it) it was the beginning of the end of the soft-voiced phase. She always seemed annoyed by having to stop being nice. She smoked her cigarette as if she were angry with it.

‘I don’t know why you have to do this,’ she said. ‘I really don’t. Why do you keep doing this?’

Sometimes that would be all it took. The wood-framed armchair would crick with the shift of her weight and she’d be on her feet. Other times it went on longer. Like she wanted to make the nice phase last. Or not exactly the nice phase, but the one in which he was making her lose her patience.

‘It’s not like I’m asking you to learn Chinese,’ she said, and laughed a little. Leon didn’t understand: Chinese was brownish noodles in cartons she sometimes had. They looked like worms to Leon. ‘It’s just the damned alphabet. Don’t you know if you don’t get this you’re going to be no better than a
retard
your whole life? It’s no wonder your mother dumped you.’

But by this time Leon’s mouth would’ve locked and his face gone thick with heat. Sometimes he’d try to focus on the view through the window, the green lawn and the crazy two-legged tree and the blinding white mailbox and the woods beyond.

‘You’re not even
looking
,’ Mama Jean said. Then left a long pause. In which Leon could feel the room filling with what he knew was coming next.

Paulie stood by Xander’s bed, watching him. He didn’t like seeing him like this. Weak.

Did he?

A part of him was thrilled. In spite of the terror at what the world without Xander would be like, he found himself having the extraordinary thought that here was Xander, feeble and out of it, and that if he, Paulie, were to now go and get the gun and point it at Xander and pull the trigger and put a bullet in Xander’s brain there would be absolutely nothing Xander could do about it. Or the machete. Imagine that. Imagine the weight of the blade. Lifting it. Xander’s eyes maybe fluttering open just long enough to see what was happening. Then Paulie swinging it down with all his strength. Feeling the neck go. Or the skull split.

His hands were heavy. The image made him dizzy. He thought:
Are you out of your fucking mind?

‘C is for elephant,’ Xander said, with a strange clarity. It made Paulie start. He hadn’t felt the solidity of the room’s silence until Xander had broken it.

‘Jesus,’ Paulie said. ‘You don’t look good. How’re you feeling?’

Xander’s eyes were closed and busy behind their lids. Paulie had an image of hundreds of people – police, waitresses, nurses, firemen, office commuters and government officials in dark suits – all watching this and creeping slowly towards him.

Xander opened his eyes. His face was wet. He was shivering under the blankets.

‘It’s his fault,’ he said, looking at Paulie.

‘What?’

‘Fucking idiot. You break the thing. You don’t do it right. Then everything goes. It should’ve been a kite. No, a jug. Goddammit.’

‘Listen,’ Paulie said. ‘Do you want me to try’n get you something? Some medicine?’

Xander slowly and awkwardly pulled his right hand out from under the blankets. It was trembling.

And holding the gun.

He pointed it at Paulie.

‘It should have been a fucking
jug
,’ Xander said.

Paulie felt himself backpedalling. On air. It was as if only the very tips of his toes were touching the floor. Bizarrely, he was also aware of the bright image on the TV screen in the room’s darkness: two incredibly beautiful bare-shouldered women having lunch at a sunny outside table with bright white napkins and the light winking off their champagne glasses and jewellery. The camera cut between close-ups of their faces. Smiles that looked as if they hated each other. Their eyes looked like dark diamonds.

The wardrobe bumped his back.

Xander fired.

Paulie went, briefly, completely blank. Except for a vague feeling of the world being upended, floor and walls and ceiling losing their connection to each other. After what felt like a long delay the sound of wood splintering. A detail embedded in the deafening noise of the gunshot.

There was no pain. He pieced it together. It felt as if he had all the time in the world to piece it together: Xander had missed. The bullet had gone into the wardrobe.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Paulie heard himself saying, quietly. His body was doing things, trying to move. He was on his side on the floor. His arms and legs were working to get him back onto his feet. But his limbs were wearing dozens of soft weights. Xander’s hand on the gun was moist. His wrist bent for a moment, as if broken, then gradually straightened. He was levelling for a second shot.

Everything went very still. Paulie felt the room in shock from the sound of the gunshot. The smell of cordite like a scar on the odours of old wood and damp plaster. Death suddenly right there. He never thought about death. Not his own. Not the women’s. There was only the fascination of their warm bodies slippery with blood that he could do anything to, and then afterwards his feeling of crazy sweet electric aliveness, and the open-ended glimmering time between then and the next time, the next one.

But now something indistinct rushed up to him in a wave of blackness. The thought of dying and going somewhere where it would be worse than the creeping conspiracy of all the people, a place where you’d be compelled forwards through darkness with only a few stars, the last few stars, as if you were reaching the edge of space, towards something that knew you and saw through you, and nothing would protect you from it, you’d be totally naked and eventually you’d see it. You’d see it, and it would see you. And what happened then would last for ever.

Xander’s eyelids flickered and his lips moved. His sweat-soaked head made his hair look thin. Like a baby bird, Paulie thought. He moved his aim slightly, hand still shaking – then the strength went out of him and his arm dropped back onto the bedclothes. He didn’t let go of the gun.

Paulie scrambled to his feet and ran from the room.

He couldn’t think straight. He went downstairs and got the shotgun. Loaded it. The weight and solidity of the thing felt strange. He was breathing through his open mouth. Xander had shot at him.
It’s like carrying you on my goddamned back
. Xander had
shot
at him. But Xander was sick. Crazy sick. Fever made you insane. But there was all that shit about the fucking milk jug. Like death, Paulie didn’t think about the objects. They were there; they were at the edge of his thinking – but he always stopped short. He glanced out of the kitchen window expecting to see the thousands of people closing in, their faces determined. But there was nothing. Just the low outbuildings and the dead cars and the twilit empty land rolling away.

He went back upstairs, quietly, shotgun raised.

There was no sound from Xander’s room.

He stood still at the edge of the open doorway.

Very slowly inched forward to get a peep inside.

Xander’s eyes were closed again. His arm lay outside the blankets, relaxed, fingers loose around the automatic.

Asleep.

At a friend’s house once when he was very small a grown-up had read them
Jack and the Beanstalk
. Jack tiptoeing in to steal the harp from the sleeping giant. There was a picture in the book, the giant slumped forward on a vast wooden table. The big hands and dark curly hair. Jack the size of a monkey by comparison.

You have to get the gun away from him. He’s fever-mad. He fucking shot at you. It’ll be all right when he comes out of it. It’ll be all right, but who knows what the fuck while he’s like this?

There was another voice underneath the one saying
It’ll be all right
(saying
No, it won’t
) but he ignored it.

Amazed at himself, Paulie propped the shotgun against the corridor wall, bent down, unlaced and removed his boots.

It felt terrible just in his socks. It felt as if he’d taken
all
his clothes off. The women, even if you’d got them to stop screaming and wriggling, always started screaming and wriggling again when you tore their blouses and bras, when you tugged off their jeans and yanked down their panties. It was the flesh, bare. It was the exposure. For the first time, Paulie felt a weird, piercing identification with them.

But it was sucked like a spark into darkness.

Shotgun as steady as he could hold it, he crept into the room.

Three paces. Four. Five.

He was at the bed.

Every time he tried to picture Xander opening his eyes and raising the pistol – every time he tried to imagine himself squeezing the Remington’s trigger and Xander’s head exploding in blood – the image fizzed and heated and went into confusion. You had to not ask yourself if you’d be able to do it when the time came. Instead he told himself that all he had to do was take the automatic away for now. Then Xander would get better and everything would be all right. Xander would come out of it and everything would be all right and the little bitch in the basement was the prettiest they’d had and he could feel the gooseflesh on her tits and how sweet going into her would be, her body with the fear like a warm welcome.

He braced the shotgun, reached out. In the story the giant’s magical harp had cried out ‘Master! Master!’ when Jack had got hold of it, and Paulie had a dreamy certainty that the handgun would do the same. But of course that didn’t happen. Paulie slipped the pistol from Xander’s grip and stuffed it into his back pocket.

Xander made a soft noise – a murmur – but his eyes didn’t open.

Back in the hallway, Paulie rested for a long time against the cool of the wall. He was drenched in sweat, but his skin felt cold. It occurred to him that he might be getting Xander’s flu.

He didn’t have long to ponder what that would mean.

Because by the time he’d got his boots back on there was a pounding coming up from the basement.

Claudia had thought she was resolved, but when it came down to it she spent a long time just standing with her arms wrapped around herself, shaking. Everything she’d thought had a perverse mathematical insistence. The cold part of her brain knew it was right. But it was weak in comparison to the deep instinct. The deep instinct was to preserve being alive and more or less unharmed and alone for as long as possible. The deep instinct was to wait and hope and pray and plead. The deep instinct was not to do anything which might provoke the men who had taken her captive. Granted she was locked in. Granted the only thing she could hold onto was the possibility of someone coming to her rescue. But still,
right now
, for these precious moments, she was OK. The thought of doing something to change that – the thought of voluntarily doing something that would, one way or another, take her out of
right now
and into something unknown (unknown except in that it would be all or nothing, would either get her out or rush the horror of her future into her present) was all but overwhelming. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. Every time she braced herself and said, inwardly:
Now
– she found herself unable to move. Every time she told herself it was her only chance the profound habit of life gathered in her and said:
No, don’t. It’s madness. It won’t work. You can’t. You cannot do this.

But the thinking – the reasoning – was, she knew, unimpeachable. If she did nothing and no one came to her rescue the two men would rape and torture and murder her. She had absolutely no doubt of that. It might happen in a minute, in an hour, a day, a week – but if no help came it would certainly happen. Which meant either waiting and hoping for help – or trying to get away. It was the part of her that made her unlike Alison that knew this. It was what made her unlikeable. For Claudia the truth had always been the truth, regardless of its ugliness. Her whole life people had been shocked and wounded and outraged and frankly afraid of her because she had no patience with denial and white lies and looking away from things just because they were hideous. Her mother, who was quiet and intelligent and had given both her daughters lots of liberal room for their growing up, had once said to Claudia (after Claudia had sent Alison away from an argument in tears): It’s a great thing to be able to tell the truth, darling. But there is such a thing as gentleness for the people you love. Just because a thing is true doesn’t mean it can’t be used cruelly. Be careful with your talents.

The truth, Claudia now realised, had never been put to the test until now. Because she knew the truth of her situation – yet remained incapable of acting on it. Fear, it turned out, was more than a match for truth.

And so for what felt like hours she had stood with her arms wrapped around herself and the roll of metal in her pocket, the stubborn, clinical part of her mind repeatedly offering her its incontrovertible conclusions – and terror stopping her from accepting them.

But the reasoning didn’t go away. If she acted now she would, in all likelihood, only have one of them to get past. If she waited, there would be two. And she couldn’t make herself believe she’d get past two of them.

She pulled the roll of metal from her jacket pocket.

And if you get past him, then what? If the house is locked? What? If you get out of the house? What? Run? Did they leave the keys in the RV? And if they did, can you drive it?
She had a terrible image of herself fumbling with keys, her hands filled with madness, knowing the seconds were racing away, knowing that they were coming. Would she have what it took? If it came to running – just running on her own dreaming legs – would she be able to run far and fast enough?

But that image – of herself free and running into the good darkness, back in the world beyond this one – dizzied her with pure need, and her mind let go a little, and without being fully conscious of what she was doing she lay down on the floor and began kicking the furnace and shouting as loudly as she could.