I Was Dora Suarez (2 page)

He leaned against the doorjamb of this room, his black hair making an intense splash against the dead yellow wall. From there he surveyed his principal work, taking no more than a quick look in the mirror to admire his sated eyes, which, he had to admit to himself – though he went through the solemn, absurd ritual of asking himself if it were true – looked pretty terrific. He never realised the truth about his eyes because he was accustomed to believing that their dominating gaze was unique; objectively, though, they were not in the least as he conceived them. Far from it. Far from being attractive, as he was convinced they were, they struck others as eyes that had perished violently centuries ago, and there was also some form of lacquer over them that lent them the expressionless look that you see in the eyes of the dead.

He whispered, looking down at what he had done: ‘I could have been a lot neater than that, matey – really a lot neater.’

There was no one there to answer him, of course, and yet again there was no question but that he was dead right.

Mind, the place had looked bad enough anyway already, even before he had erupted into it. The high, icy old room he stood in had already been reduced by neglect and the losing struggles of its occupants to the point where it was now just a decayed, filthy relic of mouldering plaster, the wallpaper sliding towards the floor in the damp – in fact it was so wet in there that the killer’s breath emerged as fog and hung motionless in the jaundiced air until in the end it rolled slowly away from him towards the wall like bad jokes emerging out of the mouth of a cartoon character. Two grubby beds with plates and the remains of food on them stood eighteen inches apart, each under an Indian counterpane worked in red tapestry and adorned with small glass discs sewn in, and it was in the gap between these beds, on a square of greasy carpet, that he had felled Suarez. She lay with the left side of her head half
split off, and her left breast, severed from the rib cage, had slithered out of the front of her low-cut dress and lay not far from her, partly in her blood, partly inside its bra.

‘Yeah, well now, that was a real carve-up wasn’t it?’ the killer screamed. ‘A right royal fucking shambles! You could have done better than that, my friend – an unbelievably whole lot better, couldn’t you, you fucking amateur?’

Yes, well he could have, only he had totally done his pieces when she put a hand out to reason with him. She started to say ‘I love you anyway,’ but the mere mention of that word, compared to his intentions, sickened him, so that he had impatiently cut into the arm extended to him at its shoulder with the cutting edge of his axe; at times he still listened with the keen pleasure of a music lover to the clean steel grinding through wet red bone. But where he had gone wrong was that the wound made her hoot and howl, of course, and so made it that much more difficult for him to get her into the position where he wanted her for his main stroke – and besides it made blood too soon just when, like any lover, he wanted to take his time and move slowly towards his climax. But, on the other hand, who the fuck needed to listen to anything she had to say when all he wanted from her was relief for his raving passion, to get the clean scent of her blood in his nose, to get his face, his mouth, his cock down into her?

And so, overexcited by her terror and her pitiful efforts to avoid him, he had let the short, serviceable fireman’s axe he had turn in his hand, which was sweating because of his fury and excitement, so giving the girl that fraction of time to pivot as the blade came for her – and even then when, having missed his trick, he appeared to quieten down, half smiling and saying to her (in some imitation of a Midlands accent, remembering a former occasion in Nottingham where that had worked really well): ‘Let’s be calm, let’s calm down now, shall us?’ trying to soothe her as a groom does when he approaches a nervous young mare to gentle her, humming absently and pleasantly, she still wouldn’t accept the axe when he showed it to her again, ritually presenting it to that white
neck of hers – so that in the death he had to come for her pretty well any old how in one of those great curving rushes of his. Silly little bat, she kept trying to get away from him long after there was nowhere for her to go, telling him over and over that she had made her peace with the world, which infuriated him in a delicious way – and yet all he achieved by the panic he had caused in her was make her trip over one of the trailing sheets between the two beds, which created a prize cock-up, because all she did then was fall with a thud on the floor and a bit later, even when she did finally manage to get up again, she had by then got her stupid little head in totally the wrong position for him, so that instead of his being able to take her head clean off, bag up and leave, he somehow got in a fluster. And now look at the fucking place, a shambles, shit order! It wasn’t a question of the blood everywhere or the smell of her entrails in the frozen room that upset him so much as the mess he had made of her. She was sad to look down at, like a fuck that hadn’t come off; the assorted bits of her lying all over the toffee shop left him with an emptiness, they left him wanting to take the whole scene back and play it again.

He’d be punishing himself for this, of course – still, in the meantime,
whew!

He got jerked off over her all right in the end, though, just the same, even though he nearly bit his bottom lip off doing it. The pain he was in down there, the state it was all in, didn’t make it easy; however, he had been pretty sure he would manage to come for her all right, make her in the end all right, the minute he slammed the door behind him at College Hill, hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and started slamming his feet passionately down to South Circular Road. Yes, of course coming had been painful for him, but just look down now and see what had happened! It had been bloody hard work and he had had to bend double over her, racing away at the meat, but when the sweet relief did come, you could see where he had literally sprayed all over her sweet Christ, what power he still had!

And then what about that bit after his first go at her when his
axe had simply smacked into her right arm just like that, like almost casual – and she had burst out crying and bleeding, holding back from him like a little bride while she clung to her bright wound that had already aroused and excited him like a pig – and then they had then both danced swiftly around almost like lovers, backwards and forwards, barging into the furniture and things. He felt quite simply exalted, so that he just could not help himself getting down to her on the floor again and licking her blood again just once more, peering into her wounds, which he opened gently with his fingers, to see where his semen had gone, and how he and she mixed, murmuring love words to her because she was still alive. Then, when he had finally had enough, he pulled her up to him with her bleeding face to his and told her, ‘I’m ready now, Dora, this is it, love,’ and he cut her straight across the throat with the wrong, blunt edge of the axe as she held on to her bad arm like a bad swimmer hanging on to the lip of the pool and he gazed at the stains of his sperm on the skirt of her new dress as he did it to her. Then, after she had died, he had an idle go at decapitating her, but because she could no longer react, the game bored him straight away. Presently, though, there arrived his detached interest: didn’t these people make an extraordinary noise when you did it to them just? Jesus, yes, that was yet another snap for the old souvenirs – he had really conquered tonight! It was more like a gargling squawk they made than a scream really; and then there was like a short noise like a kind of gasp they made as the throat parted in smiling, pouring lips. The noise was like when his dad used to do it to a chicken, only a great deal louder.

Now he felt like inching back in a ratlike posture, bold but careful, to the spot by the window where he had left his shoulder bag and listened, but there wasn’t a sound to be heard in the flats as he got a rag out of the old Adidas carryall and began to wipe his axe, taking care not to cut himself – Christ, it was sharp! As for the silence in the flats, that didn’t surprise him at all, for they stood in a prime residential area where the big property combines had forgotten very few places indeed and catered for the old and rich,
who didn’t care what rent and rates they paid as long as, in return, they didn’t have to be pestered over the unemployed, ethnic minorities, handicapped people or anything else even remotely disturbing. It was, as a matter of fact, because the tenants in Empire Gate didn’t want to know about anything unpleasant at all that the killer had been enabled to behave more or less as if he were at home.
The Times
, like Axel’s servants, did the tenants’ living for them, and the slavish need to sell newspapers that lay behind their intellectual and other pretensions meant that all the really dirty washing could be kicked downstairs to some base court or other where all that nasty kind of thing belonged. For Empire Gate was a street filled with doddling old millionaires whose wallets fitted their porticos and facades, and the whole district, therefore, shut down early at night with not a taxi to be had except for sweet pickups from the Japanese and Arab hotels where the man on the door copped for his drops. The flat where the killer was now, leased for ninety-nine years by Betty and Billy Carstairs when they married in the risky days of 1940 (and sensible folk such as occupied the street now were nowhere to be found at the time because they were afraid of taking a German bomb and so had ‘regretfully left for Canada’ as the formula went then until the poor stupid bastards that had stayed on got the lights working again). Betty Carstairs’s was the only flat in the block, therefore, which, because of her lease, the developers had been obliged to leave out; then, too, it was also sandwiched between the embassies of two mad countries whose revolutions came and went in the evening papers – but who cared anyway? There was the good old British police, wasn’t there? And look at what that cost!

Meantime the killer stood icily, his presence, luckily for the tenants’ sleep – besieged as it was by dreams of wigs, sledgehammers, blackmailing ex-daughters-in-law etc. – unsuspected. He felt replete, thanks to his activities, a hungry man with a full belly at last amongst this load of selfish old people in the evening of their days who had never done anything in life except invest their money and keep their heads down. He knew what sort of
people they were because he had been keeping an eye on them from the abandoned basement garden for several weeks and could well imagine the scream that was going to go up when this lot was discovered. And there was no doubt it would be soon – for the weather was rainy and fairly warm, and the neglected dead made their decay known just as definitely in Kensington as they did in College Hill.

The killer knew he ought to be leaving himself now, only he couldn’t bring himself to do it straightaway; for how could he bear to turn his back on a feast of new blood like this one as perfunctorily as if he were simply refusing a beer? To him, the scene, the collops of her flesh, her blood everywhere, encompassed all the elements of a marriage. It had just been celebrated. He, the groom, had just ritually drunk her blood, trodden in it and masturbated into pieces of her warm flesh, thus finally owning her; and no, there was no question of his leaving his bride just like that – it would have amounted to an insult! And then, what was more, the shotgun-marriage element of the ceremony appealed to him as a bandit as running water does to a man dying of thirst – running things fine, after all, formed a deep part of his thrill at being active again after being months in limbo at College Hill, suspended like a bat in its sleep, clutched upside down to a beam in winter. Looking around the flat, at the blood, at the two women’s bodies, yes, he felt like a married man, the head of a family who had rightly been provided for by his womenfolk, had eaten and drunk his fill, had been truly and richly served, and was now enjoying his afters while awaiting coffee. Now what he really hankered after was a cream chocolate. Like other multiple killers he fluently transposed the negative language of death into an appetite for food. The evening was very nearly a masterpiece, so that at last he really felt like the sturdy, exhausted young lover that he had to believe he was, climbing softly out of bed while girlie sleeps, to raid the fridge. He never for an instant believed that he would be caught, and would have been as contemptuous of any lecture or punishment for his
evening’s work as any man would be if he were threatened with imprisonment for having a fuck.

There were glaring differences, of course.

Everything would have been all right (in fact lovely, he said to himself) if only it hadn’t been for his balls-up with the girl. Naturally, it wasn’t the girl herself he was bothered about (she belonged to him), but something more abstruse. Somehow the evening had gone wrong. It was not a hundred percent to his satisfaction, and in his opinion it was all the girl’s fault: it came down to her stupid obstinacy, her trying to stop him doing what he had to do to her. For the killer was really like the worst kind of soldier that every army dreads but has never been able to avoid; he receives orders from somewhere above, no matter where, that literally have to be executed. He has no capacity whatever for analysis (he believed that in killing the girl these were his desires that he was obeying, since he was that true ace of folly, the murdering fool). However, he had brains of a kind. He had to have, because of course he was a one-man army. He was the planner at GHQ – but he was also the man in the trench with the bomb and the rifle. The killer was really, in his head, like a clerk gone mad with a weapon that by some appalling freak he knows how to use. Using it made him feel useful, it kind of helped him get his solitary little rocks off, so that he could return to his frigid home at the death of the day rubbing his hands, having coldly and logically obeyed the plan received from, er, somewhere, rubbing his hands and smiling at his wife with a warmth, derived from the superb order reigning in his files, which is absurd only to others. The needs of the other mean nothing to people like that. The one thing that matters to people like that is that the plan presented from above, no matter what it says, must be obeyed to the letter at no matter what cost; it is the only orgasm such a person will ever know. For any authoritative plan assures the existence of those who have none, which is why many make love and war; in the meantime it also, if you do what you’re told in it, produces a cheque at the end of the month. Killer or clerk – but then after
all, if you’re born dead, nobody costs anything anyway. These wretched people (clerks, killers, anyway absent people) would be laughable if it weren’t for the immense damage they do; and of course it is because we do laugh at them, switch them off the telly whenever they appear, and so on, that they do the damage because of that self-despair which they can never afford to acknowledge.