LONDON SHARK: CHAPTER THREE

Prologue here; all subsequent chapters available from the prologue

C h a p t e r T h r e e

L E I A

The next day was a Friday. A school day. He woke around 5 am and listened to the sounds of his estate: front doors opening and closing; car and van doors repeating this. Engines starting, faltering. The rubber blades of windscreen wipers and handheld ice scrapers being drawn through the night’s accumulation of frost; the occasional exchange of barks and growls between the estate’s dogs, the grunts of greetings and apologies swapped between their owners. The early bus hurtling its few occupants to Cambridge. He slept in a black t-shirt and boxers. He had showered late the previous night, as usual, after his parents had slammed themselves away into their bedroom. He would wear the tee and underwear until showering tonight. His duvet was thin and dressed in Transformers bedding. His head was nestled squarely in the centre of a single pillow, and he looked straight up to the overhead light, watching shadows and car lights dancing over its shade as the cars and vans overcame the morning’s fresh coldness.

He could just make out his own breath as he exhaled silently. He lay supine until seven, as the sunlight edged in and chased away the shadows. He thought of Leia constantly. Had dreamed of her, had dreamed that he had visited her home with flowers and love, had brought about her radiant smile. She had welcomed him inside, where he shyly handed her the flowers. She had insisted that the bouquet was beautiful and that the blooms must be unwrapped from their plastic shawl, which she did carefully before placing them in a vase she brought out from a cupboard underneath her sink. Her hand, he had dreamed, was wrapped in a pink bandage and tied together with purple and gold ribbons. She had filled the vase with water and arranged the flowers within, carefully separating each stalk and allowing each flowerhead to show off its colourful petals. He knew nothing of flowers and he could only dream about them with childlike brushes; outsized stigma standing proud from a dotted circle of anthers, surrounded by a ring of huge petals, flawlessly created and arranged by nature. The vase, he noticed, was shaped like a woman’s torso. It was the colour of white skin, with a dark red strip, dotted with decorative silver studs, was around its fullest point. He had smiled with glee at her loving reaction of his gift, this token of her love. He stepped towards her, hoping to absorb the radiance of her smile. She moved towards him holding the vase. Her injured hand was clasped over the other as they clutched the vase. His heart had danced. He saw a line of blood trickling from between the layers of the bandage. Leia’s smile had dropped as she recognised the look of worry on his face. She looked down at her hand.

‘Goodness!’ she said. ‘And to think I thought I was all bled out by now!’ She rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders coquettishly at this and thrust the vase towards his chest. He took hold of them.

‘Find somewhere for this, will you? You’ve picked such lovely flowers for me that I’m sure you’ll find just the perfect spot to show them off in. She smiled sweetly.

‘I’m just going to clean this up now, before it drips onto the carpet!’ She held up her bandaged hand. The line of blood had doubled in width and seemed darker and faster flowing now; like a stream at night which has fewer sensory rivals for its gurgling and the faint outline of its flow to compete with.

He could not speak, just watched her dash along the hallway, and into what he presumed was her bathroom. His hands were clammy on the vase, and he adjusted his hands lest it slips from his grip. On doing so he noted that the silver studs interjected around the dark red ring of the vase were U nails, the kind that Adam Andrews had fired into Leia’s hand, that they had caused the vase to bleed the red ring. He gasped and juggled the vase for a moment. ‘All okay out there?’ she called out in an upbeat, singsong voice.

‘…Fine,’ he croaked.

‘Okay, I’ll just be a minute. I’m going to get undressed.’

His heart bounded again. The vase seemed to have softened in his hands. When he looked at it now, he saw that it was skin, was human skin, was Leia’s soft milky skin. It was supple and tactile in his hands. He began to hyperventilate as he looked desperately about the living room for a shelf or table to place the vase. The skin was beautiful to touch but the red ring had melted from being a decorative pattern now to being blood, true blood, with its iron tang scenting the air, its warm wetness slick between his fingers. He wanted to cry but could only dash about the room, looking for a suitable place to offload the thing.

‘There. All cleaned up and rebandaged,’ Leia cooed from the bathroom. ‘Now, I just need to find something to wear . . .’ There was something in her voice that made the statement flirty and filled him with a new exciting impetus. With fear, too.

The flowers in the vase of skin had wilted and blackened. Their sudden death had an overpowering smell that reminded him of the compost heap his father had started several years ago, had promptly abandoning its maintenance and left it in the care of the local rodent populace. There was nowhere free to put the vase. When he entered the house, he was sure there had been a coffee table in the centre of the room, and shelving and windowsills that would have made apposite places for his gift. But these had gone and in their place were rocks that jutted from the floor, shapeless and impossible to stand anything on.

He knelt and placed the vase on the carpet. The standing water in the vase had turned stagnant and was oozing out onto the floor, lapping at his shoes, his pathetic cheap school shoes. He couldn’t let go of the vase; its body of skin was melding into something as if an unseen potter was shaping the something that wanted to take his hands, stop him from getting away. And the something was hands; mangled hands that grew out from the vase, took his hands inside their wretched fingers as U nails burst from the wreckage of the vase and stapled the boneless, flaps of wrists of the vase hands to his inner wrists.

She was calling again. ‘Could you help me choose a top?’

He fought back heavy, hot tears while trying to wrestle the hands from his, as the black water from the vase thickened into blood which overflowed from the vase. Seconds later he felt it seeping through his pathetic shoes. The hands continued to grab at his with a grip way more powerful than he could muster. He staggered towards the bathroom, from where he could hear Leia humming happily away. Bloody footprints in his wake, he neared the door. The hands upon his, it seemed, were tiring, were diminishing in their grip. He was able to wrench them from his own hands, the U nails pinging and firing out into the walls and floor and ceiling. He hurled the hands behind him to the front room.

Outside the bathroom, its door ajar, he made an effort to cleanse himself for his lover, for his Leia. He wiped the blood and gore on the back of his school trousers and glimpsed around the door. She wasn’t there. All he could see was a white sink into which a mixer tap poured steaming water. Hmmm, hmmm . . . Leia was still humming, from somewhere deeper in her house. He crept along the hallway, nearing his love. The walls of her modest little house had mineralised and looked light grey and dank, while the carpets were heading the same way. He felt something tugging at one of his trouser legs. It was the conjoined vase hands, trying to drag him back, back to the front room, which was no longer there, just a black yawning chasm.

‘Through he-re,’ she called. ‘Really want you in my bedroom, right—

He kicked the hands away and went to rush along to the next door in the hallway, which still looked normal among the rock walls. The door creaked open as his shadow fell upon it. Her own shadow fell upon the rock-carpet, her womanly curves perfectly silhouetted. Her arms were behind her back.

‘Think you could help me with—I’m a bit stuck, can’t seem to get this silly bra off . . .’

He looked back, expecting to see the hands screaming towards his face. But they were laid immobile, like a long-dead spider, its fingers broken, its life extinguished. There was nothing to stop him from entering Leia’s bedroom. She was inviting him in. To help unfasten her bra!

His mind froze, jettisoned his thoughts of love and sex. His throat grew tight and think; his heart rampaged.

‘Are you coming . . ?’ she asked, teasingly. Her shadow grew larger on the floor. ‘Are you a little shy . . . you don’t need to be. Not with me. Look, I’ll turn around. Then will you please help a girl out?’

He swallowed; sure his tongue had swollen to the size of a cricket ball. But he managed to mumble, ‘Yes, sure,’ and take a step towards her. Their shadows merged as she turned around. His fingers were fuzzy with anticipation. He hoped they would work, obey his brain. Another step and he was behind her, her bare back covered only by the solitary strapping of a white bra.

Staring down at her handless arms. He gasped.

‘Not sure what’s happened there!’ She giggled. She was trying to reach for her bra clasp. The ends of her arms were covered in a translucent skin that was folded over like filo pastry, through which he could see dark, woefully underdeveloped, hazelnut-sized digits that were uselessly straining to gain purchase on the clasp. They looked to him like the black eyes of maggots who were pumping to writhe themselves into rotting meat.

She turned, locked her eyes with his.

‘Well? Going to help?’

The walls began to crumble, and the airbrakes of a bus sounded outside his house as he came to, the dream disintegrating as sharply as the driver had slammed on his brakes. He felt sick as he raised himself up to his elbows, parted his bedroom’s curtains and peered out of the ajar window. The bus’s driver had wound his window down, poked a black woollen-hatted head out into the freezing morning and was remonstrating, albeit reasonably amicably, with his next-door neighbour, a dour, hunched widower called Richard. Richard has left the driver-side door wide open, facing into the centre of the road, and was jogging towards the offending door now, clutching a bottle of blue liquid.

‘C’mon mate, some of us have got places to go,’ chirped the bus driver with jovial menace, leaning towards Richard.

‘Sorry,’ muttered Richard. Embarrassed by his negligence yet too taciturn a man to combat the bus driver’s jaunty tones.

He drew the curtains before either man noticed him, aware of a stirring across the first-floor landing that mean his parents were rising. Before he could be beaten to the bathroom he jumped up and dashed out of his room. Once locked in the bathroom, he sat on the toilet and did his best to excise the toxic spores of the dream from his mind. He accepts that the spores are in his mind forever; recalls his science teacher Mr Martinson, a diminutive, thickly side-burned man impressing on his remit of eleven and twelve-year-olds that mould spores can be as deadly when they are killed as when they are alive; that the dead and alive states of spores aren't as clearcut as when a person has died, or they are still breathing. This pulsated his mind, made his heart beat blackly. Mould was a regular by-product of his childhood negligence, spattered like machine gun fire around the shower cubicle, and across the bathroom ceiling. In the fridge, often on the food within. His father occasionally chiselled off the worst of the bathroom spores, peeled away ancient strips of paint peppered with the stuff. Left it in black bags out back, where it could lay dormant for several weeks before anyone thought to move it to the kerb for collection. The weekend after Martinson's lesson hooked onto his memory, he rooted among the piles of black refuse sacks in the back garden and cut swatches of dried, sporous paint from the discarded lengths inside. Equipped with a cheese grater and wearing his father's welding mask, he grated the mould onto his parents' pillows and carefully pushed some of the powdered spores into the ends of their cigarettes, wondering if and when they would have an effect. He retained further mouldy swatches in an unemployed, ink-stained pencil case under his bed, thinking what a crucial ally they could be in the dark and horrible ways with which he planned to exact revenge on the person whose actions had hospitalised his lover, had filled his mind with a lovelorn gore.

Adam Andrews.