Authors: Toby Litt
Corpsing (2 page)
It is a balmy, bare-fleshed Friday evening, late in August. Lily and I are seated opposite each other upstairs at Le Corbusier, a Modern French restaurant half-way along Frith Street.
The interior designer has won several international awards for creating this innovative-yet-functional space.
The upstairs room is clinical. The tables are a frosty-looking brushed aluminium. The walls are half mirror, half stainless steel. The floor is hard, pale, unpolished wood. The lighting comes from fluorescent strip-lights part-concealed behind the edges of the mirrors. The food is served on white porcelain plates. The cutlery is stainless steel. The napkins are white cotton. The napkin holders are rings of shiny stainless steel. The waiters wear white cotton jackets with stainless-steel buttons. French bread is served on a napkin of white cotton in a bowl of latticed aluminium with a rim of stainless steel.
The waiter – with close-shaven head and a thick goatee-beard – is taking our orders: for me, the puffball and the grilled plaice, for Lily, the asparagus and the veal escalope.
Already, we have compromised on a 1992 Chardonnay – which has turned out aromatic and endearing, the little of it we have so far drunk.
All of this – the restaurant, the mere idea of the restaurant – is much more expensive than I can afford.
But I can afford even less to let Lily know that.
‘Fine,’ I say, handing the menu back to the waiter.
It is far from fine.
It is six-weeks-three-days since Lily and I split up, unamicably, at her insistence. Before then we had been going out for two years, and living together for one. The top-floor Notting Hill flat which we shared belonged to her (and before her to her parents), so I was the one forced to move out. I found myself a ground-floor flat in Mordake, grotty but cheap.
The moment Lily said she didn’t love me or fancy me any more, pop songs started to play in my head – and not just any pop songs: really crappy, supposedly forgettable ones: ‘Can’t Smile Without You’, ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, ‘All By Myself, ‘You’re an Uptown Uptempo Woman (I’m a Downtown Downbeat Guy)’. I sat on the edge of what was now
her
sofa, weeping. She told me not to be so silly. I was out of there within a fortnight. I remember walking away from the flat for what I thought was the last time – the keys to the front door no longer in my pocket.
And yet here I am with Lily again, facing her over a frosty-looking brushed-aluminium table in Le Corbusier.
Lily’s body is something I am so familiar with – yet there it is, sitting across from me, become a forbidden thing.
I know and can remember the minutest things about her: the squeak her fingernails made against the pillows under my head; the little clattering clicks her teeth made in the few slow moments after she fell asleep, always before me; the eggy smell of her early morning yawns.
Never again will my fingertips tap down upon her hard flat
stomach. Never again will my tongue make tiny circles around her salty-sweet clitoris.
This is outrageous,
I am thinking.
This is almost obscene.
I remember her habits, her ways: how she used to steal my pillow the moment I got out of bed to go to work, cradling its warmth to her belly as she had so rarely cradled me; how she would suck me off, and would swallow, but had to brush her teeth immediately afterwards, couldn’t not.
As I sit there opposite her, I feel that her body is something that I have almost a
right
to be intimately involved with.
What I really want to do,
I am thinking, as I look across at Lily, gazing out over the widening gap of success and down into the chasm of indifference,
what I want most of all in the world is to make you pregnant: I want to put a cut in your life so deep that the scar will be the first thing people mention when they mention you, think of when they think of you. And, even more, I want you to
want
me to make you pregnant.
I am still in love with her.
All that happened, all she said, and I am still in love with her.
She is saying something now.
‘Bastard,’ I hear Lily say.
The first bullet (there are to be six: evenly distributed – three for her, three for me – though not equally destructive) enters Lily’s body approximately two inches beneath her left breast. Slowly, or if not slowly then gradually, or if not gradually then at least moment by moment, leaving no gap in actual proceeding time, jumping no millimetre completely, the bullet begins its inevitable passage into Lily’s thorax. A small brown mole taking the shape of a capsized figure-of-eight which she bears approximately two inches beneath her left breast, stark against her blue-white and otherwise unblemished skin, will be nowhere accounted for at the autopsy – and so instantly must be vaporized: pouff! Already, before it accomplishes even this minor initial slaughter, that first bullet has traversed ten feet of air-conditioned air, has clipped through the floating grey viscose of Lily’s ghost frock, has slit the slick black silk of her camisole. Now, however, that almost-perfect skin of hers begins slowly to stretch – resisting the onwardness of the bullet’s metal apex, denting inwards above her delicate ribcage, tightening momentarily from shoulder to hip: but then – after this false, hopeless opposition – punctures easily enough. An anticlockwise spin has been imparted to the bullet by spiral grooves – called rifles – back inside the barrel of the guilty gun. This spinning motion maximizes flight-stability and therefore increases terminal accuracy. But it is the skin-stretch of kinetic energy not the drill of missile-spin that takes the bullet through into first flesh.
Entrance wounds are notoriously sexy. And although I will not get to see Lily’s wounds while they are fresh, I will study photographs of other penetrations: the abrasion ring that encircles an entrance wound, caused by the bullet rubbing the skin, turning it raw, looks like bright pink lipstick under slick lipgloss.
The bullet, during the long moment of entry, is not only spinning but also yawing slightly – like a fish, swimming seen from above.
Despite refinements in weapon design over the past twenty-five years (particularly in higher quality barrelling and improved systems of rifling) some instability is always likely to occur in the flight paths of physical objects. However, this yawing only begins to play a major role in trajectorization once this first bullet has passed out of the air and into the denser material of the human body.
Lily’s body.
After the skin and a thin layer of fat (forgive me, Lily), some thoracic vessels, nerves and membranes, the bullet next enters the red cross-hatching of Lily’s ribcage muscles: external oblique, external intercostal, internal intercostal, innermost intercostal.
As the bullet passes through the cohesive but elastic tissue of the muscles, a cavity of greater diameter than the bullet’s own is temporarily created – around and behind it. For all of five to ten milliseconds after the bullet passes, this ripping-rippling emptiness pulsates – in and out, in and out – spreading damage laterally, through to tissues the bullet itself hasn’t even touched. This phenomenon is technically known as cavitation.
Next, the bullet breaks both Lily’s fifth and sixth ribs. The thudding force of this impact sends off a number of bone-splinters to do further peripheral damage.
These secondary missiles are a well-known feature of gunshot wounds, and often – as in Lily’s case – do as much damage as the primary missile.
One particularly sharp rib-fragment slides up in a smooth parabola of harm towards the apex of Lily’s heart. Another, broader and less bladelike, plunges down in the direction of her liver. A third – almost circular in shape – stops millimetres short of puncturing her spleen.
It is bone-spray and not bullet-bluntness that slits the gauzy sheet of Lily’s pleura.
By now the bullet has lost some but not much of its forward impetus, its kinetic energy. The fifth and sixth ribs – as it smashes through them – have rocked it a little, exaggerating its fishlike yawing, its ongoing wobble.
One of the ballistic laws governing the motion of a projectile through a
body states: the greatest damage will occur neither at the point of initial entry, nor at some arbitrary mid-point, but at exactly the point where there is the greatest loss of kinetic energy. In other words, the more the moving bullet starts to yaw, to wobble, to tumble, the more harm its passage will cause.
Next, the bullet carves into the inferior lobe of her left lung, a greater and more passable space – less dense, less damageable.
The bullet passes out of Lily’s left lung between the sixth and seventh ribs, severing the intercostal nerve, vein and artery. The sixth rib itself is only cracked, but the seventh shatters – spewing dusty bone-fragments off in the direction of the bullet.
When the bullet has passed a sufficient distance onwards, these bone-fragments will start to be sucked back inwards again by the contraction and resettlement of the muscle tissues.
At the moment the bullet meets the muscles of Lily’s back, it is travelling sideways. Harsh contact with her posterior ribcage has finally converted its wobble into a fully developed tumble. The bone-resistance has also slightly deformed the front end of the bullet. Tissue damage to the internal oblique, erector spinae and latissimus dorsi muscles is therefore exaggerated.
Next, through fat, dermis, epidermis, dead skin, hairs.
Because Lily – at the moment the shooting takes place – is leaning against a metal chair-back, the exit wound of the first bullet is not quite as simple as it might otherwise have been.
Exit wounds commonly look like stars, slits, circles or crescents.
In Lily’s case, the wound – because of the presence of the chair-back – becomes what is known as shored.
As the sideways bullet pops from her back, the skin is stretching outwards – and pressing, hard, against the firm stopping surface of the chair.
This pressure, which is exerted also through the fabric of Lily’s camisole and Lily’s frock, turns her exit wound from a clean, simple shape into a smeared, succulent, minutely latticed, clitoris-like thing.
‘Bastard,’ she is saying.
The hitman – at this point – is a brightly coloured blur across the extreme right of my peripheral vision.
But after the first bullet has gone through Lily, shattering the mirror behind her, I glance round to look at him.
Lily is being executed by a bike courier. He is dressed in a Day-Glo-orange cycle top. He is wearing skin-tight bicycling shorts and has a dispatch rider’s bag by his side. He is wearing a safety helmet. His eyes are hidden behind splat-shaped mirror-lensed glasses. His mouth and nose are covered by a pollution-exclusion mask. His calves are sinewy-powerful. He has a two-way radio on his left shoulder. In his right hand is a black and metallic-silver gun.
He looks like a vision of the future – a future where everyone is concerned solely with keeping their bodies fit and dodging between fast new technologies of danger, a future of which I want no part.
Somehow, I can’t believe that someone prepared to wear a Day-Glo-orange cycle top would also be prepared to kill. (Or vice versa.)
This man isn’t shooting Lily properly. He should be coached in the etiquette of it, by respectful professionals of the old school. The business should be done by men dressed in black suits (impeccably tailored by their honest uncles) and white shirts (freshly laundered by their devoted mothers). As they go gliding past the waiters, these men should share a wisecrack about the
lobsters outliving the clientele. ‘It’s a job of work,’ that should be the attitude – not ‘Come out and play’ or ‘Let’s stop off for a burger.’ This guy has stepped out of the traffic and he will step back into the traffic. It is like being killed by his bicycle, not by him. That someone wearing this techno-fibred get-up can shoot someone seems to undermine the seriousness of the act. Lily’s death – I am certain she is going to die – is being made into a joke. He should go away and change and then come back and apologize, and do it properly, with the full decorum it deserves.
As I look back at Lily, the second bullet hits her.
It is a headshot.
A plume of bloody spray whips back into the broken mirror behind her.
Her scalp is flipping up, still connected to the back of her head by a flap of skin.
I start to giggle.
As Lily leans slowly forwards, she catches my eye. I am sure she is looking out at me. From death.
‘Bastard,’ she is saying.
Lily’s head tilts further. Her eyes go up into the back of her head. As if at orgasm. As if a dying saint.
The third bullet hits her, biting through the edge of the table and lodging in her belly.
She lolls.
I am giggling and giggling and giggling and I don’t know why.
(The very last thing Lily saw in this life was – most likely, most terribly – me, my face, my open mouth, my inexplicable giggling. I don’t think I could frame an expression for her to look at at such a time that would have been adequate – but I am not an actor. And, anyway, we’re all meant to be able to perform our own lives. Only, there was no rehearsal time scheduled for this – or maybe there was. Maybe that’s why I felt so bad. I’d practised a thousand times – at the movies, in front of a video. Bang.)
Then the hitman turns and aims at me. He is about ten feet away.
I lean back in my chair, without pushing it backwards. I want to get up. I want to hide.
But I can’t. I am starting to lose my balance.
The fourth bullet, my first, skids diagonally across my chest and mashes into my left arm.
I am shouting the usual victim-things.
My head falls backwards as I lose balance.
I flinch away from the hitman.
The fifth bullet misses me completely.
The hitman moves a step closer.
I am now stuck in a ridiculous position, my chair tipping far far back, my feet supported by the underside of the table, almost horizontal, almost flying.
The sixth shot goes through my lower right side, my bowels.
People are now moving around in the edges of what I can see.
The hitman fires a shot into the ceiling.
The people stop moving.
My eyes close.
No further shots come.
I am opening my eyes.
The hitman has gone.
I am looking down.
I see that I have a white-cotton napkin in my hands and that I have folded it up several times, in halves.
As I bleed, I continue folding the napkin until it is as tight as it will go.
I look up to the ceiling and see blood dripping down.
I look down at the table.
Blood. Lots of blood. Blood everywhere. Blood all over. Blood pooling in Lily’s lap. Blood in a fine misty spray on the mirror shattered behind her. Blood jumping from her chest-wound, like a heavy red frog. Blood seeping between my fingers. Blood
staining the pale wood of the floor. Blood in the hair of the screaming woman at the table next to ours. Blood on her quiet husband’s white shirt. Blood on our food. Blood on blood. Her blood. My blood. My blood on hers. Her blood on mine. Our blood together. Blood-in-blood. Arterial blood. Venous blood. Dripping blood and blood smearing. Flowing blood and blood coagulating. Blood exiting from my body. Blood pulsing with my pulse. My blood. Life-blood. Bloody fucking. Fucking bloody.
Blessedly, I lose consciousness.
I don’t get it back for six weeks.