Talulla Rising (29 page)

‘Let the camera see you put me back in the cell,’ I said. ‘And don’t forget the leg-cuff.’

‘Right.’

‘You’re coming to see me tomorrow, yes?’

He didn’t answer, but the heat around him was palpable. His hands shook as he locked the cuff.

‘Good,’ I said, not quite looking at him. ‘I’ll see you then. And make sure you wash, will you?’

41

Two days later, after I’d fucked Wilson once (and Devaz a second time) the scientists cut my right hand off.

42

I wish I could say the time that followed was a blur, but it wasn’t. It was dense with detail. I learnt two things. One was that no amount of violence you’ve done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself. The other was that you can’t escape the marriage with your body. Divorce isn’t an option. Even when you want to stop caring about it you can’t. Even when the solution to knowing they’re going to cut off your left breast is to disown it, you can’t. It’s yours. It’s a friend you never realised you loved so tenderly and completely – until they separate it from you. It screams in silence. It retains, for a while at least, its life, its bond with you. But then, when it understands you’re never coming to reclaim it, that the contract has been utterly broken, it dies, alone and betrayed, and becomes an inert, pathetic object, indecent and forlorn.

The new totalitarian regime was pain. Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete power over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion. I got used to the sensation of my screams locked in by a gag, having to back-up and cash themselves out in my skull. I discovered pity for my body. It was endlessly renewable, this well of pity. Every mutilation drew its unique portion. Every amputation subtracted, poignantly, took away – literally – some of who I was. I cried. Not in front of them. Later, strapped to my bed, surrounded in the dark by the Christmassy lights of lab technology I cried first for my losses and second because who deserved them if not me? The scientists were indifferent to my suffering – but at least they didn’t relish it.
It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them
. Those were my words to Jake, in bed.
It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them
. Unlike the men in white we,
monsters
, wanted the person we were killing to know – through the blood-blur and the din of their own screams – not only that we knew what we were doing but that we loved doing it. We wanted our victims to see that our pleasure increased with their horror, that their horror was
required
, that their situation was hopeless. That was the dirty truth, the obscene heart of fuckkilleat: their hopelessness serviced our joy. In the court of human appeal the scientists were better off. At least they weren’t doing it for fun. At least it didn’t turn them on.

Not that that made any difference to me when they cut my breast off or gouged out my eye or wrenched the teeth from my jaws. The flesh in pain isn’t interested in Old Testament justice or ironic justice or any other kind of justice. It isn’t interested in anything except the cessation of pain. I hated them and wept for my poor body and my lonely self in the winking darkness, even as
wulf
rushed the butchered cells into regenerative action, a sensation in bone and nerves and tissue like a mass of insects racing towards something. No matter what atrocities you’ve committed you rage at those committing them on you.

They performed a hysterectomy.

I slept, on and off, dropped into and struggled out of fire-buckled dreams: one (not surprisingly) of being eaten by ants; another of Jacqueline’s French-manicured fingers peeling back the skin from Lorcan’s skull; another of the diner on Tenth Street, with the Coors neon and the pink leatherette booths and the faux shellacked counter where Clay would let me sit with my vanilla shake and talk to me about the hell his girl was giving him as if I were an adult; another of the lab mixed with the night at Big Sur, Jake dipping his cock into the raw pulp where the torn-open scientist’s heart used to be.

Then the fluorescents would vibrate and flutter into life and the white coats would appear and another session would begin. I’d never known fear before. You don’t know fear – not the fundamental kind – until you experience knowing what they’re going to do to you and being utterly powerless to stop it. Invariably I wet myself when the lights stuttered on. The scientists didn’t mind. The scientists expected it. I saw my distorted reflection in a stainless steel kidney dish. The young Clint Eastwood leaned over me and I smelled garlic and an aniseed breath mint. They punctured my lungs and broke two of my ribs. One of the bald men was named Hugh. He had large deep-printed fingertips that smelled of latex. He lit an acetylene torch and held it against me, shins, abdomen, back. First degree. Second. Third. The main surgical lamp was like a
War of the Worlds
flying saucer. They pulled out my fingernails. A blue and white cardboard box on a gurney said ZENIUM X-ray detectable abdominal sponge. Sometimes a radio played a couple of rooms away. The Black-Eyed Peas; Kylie; Lady Gaga. The scientists’ shoes squeaked on the rubberised floor. It sounded like a language. Hugh lifted my severed hand as if it had broken off a holy statue. They were interested in everything. Primarily regeneration speeds (my breast took twenty-four hours, eye six, hand and foot forty-eight, skin two, internal organs a matter of minutes), but everything else too, from T-cells to C-fibres, from lymph nodes to hormones. Sometimes they used anaesthetic, sometimes not. I healed thirty per cent faster without it, they established. A particularly rigorous session with the acetylene torch and pliers revealed that up to a point – up to a
point
– rate of regeneration increased according to the increase in pain. They called that point the UPH: the Useful Pain Horizon. Sex with Devaz and Wilson receded, became years ago. All the life before the first amputation was distant and sealed. Cauterised. Eventually, even the first amputation seemed remote. My mind was a terminal any old rubbish could enter: advertising jingles; pop songs; scenes from obscure TV movies; the laminated alphabet chart from kindergarten.

Meanwhile, through the haze, I knew days were passing: the hunger first stirred, confused, then woke, then despite the pain began to beat and scratch its distinctive demands.
Wulf
’s nose asserted itself, insisted on the scientists as
living meat
. Deodorants and the lab’s chemical fug were flashed through by stinks of their sweat and blood, an occasional whiff of stale piss or recent shit. Clint’s breath spoke now not just of a noon tuna sandwich or yesterday’s scotch but of his own deep and vital secretions. The moon was fattening and drawing the monster up through my human knit. I felt her in the join of my jaws, my femurs, my spine. I wondered what they had planned for transformation. Whatever it was it wasn’t the same as what I had planned. I spent my entire time secured in the lab now, and hadn’t seen any of the guards for days – but Devaz and Wilson were still around, not far away. I could tell.

I tried not to think of my children. Failed. Would Cloquet have contacted Madeline? Had I been stupid to suggest it? There was no betrayal in her, but wasn’t she reckless? Would she take the necessary precautions? Cloquet procuring a victim for my little girl was risky enough, but at least he was careful. Of course Zoë wouldn’t be able to make the kill herself, not unless the victim was an infant. Cloquet would have to get his hands dirtier than ever. Was he up to it? Picking up Kaitlyn in a bar and bringing her to his mistress to be murdered was one thing. Beginning the murder himself was quite another. Maybe that on its own would drive him to the London pack. And Lorcan? In a way he’d be better off. If the prophecy’s specification of sacrifice at midwinter was correct he had more than a month left to live. Since the vampires knew he’d have to feed I didn’t doubt they’d provide for him. (A perverse vision – God being dead, irony etc. – of them feeding him Konstantinov’s wife with a collective chuckle, but I ignored it.)
If
the prophecy was correct. Every now and then the size of that
if
made itself real.
Unreliably translated and massively bowdlerised
, Walker had said. Suppose the version of
The Book of Remshi
used by the faithful differed from the one WOCOP had acquired? Suppose it read not ‘midwinter’s day’ but ‘six weeks before midwinter’s day’? Suppose it said nothing at all about midwinter? Suppose Remshi could take his victim’s blood whenever he felt like it? My son could be dead already.

Then, abruptly, the mutilations stopped. I had a long stretch of morphine-edged stasis. It was as if they’d removed a hot suit of armour and put me in a bath of chilled aloe. Delicious protracted shock. Everything they’d cut off or broken or burned renewed itself, via molecular bacchanal, seamlessly. Actually not seamlessly. For a while there was a debilitating sensation where new cellular matter met old, an effect like the blood’s shudder and buzz when you bang your funny bone. Clint & co. looked annoyed – not by the results, but by having to stop. I got the impression they’d been interrupted with plenty of science still to do. Once or twice through the drug’s soundproofing I caught reference to ‘they’ or ‘them’ in a tone that said a decision they didn’t support had come down from on-high.

One morning (or rather the time when the lights came on) I woke to find Hugh preparing a hypodermic. I was still strapped down, but they’d removed the restraint that normally held my head still. Fear, it turned out, hadn’t really gone away. It was right there, immense and immediately available. He must have felt it coming off me, because I remember him saying: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a relaxant’ – before all the lights went out again.

43

The hunger dragged me awake. Even before I opened my eyes I knew full moonrise was less than twenty-four hours away.
Wulf
, impatient to fill her lungs, was all but crushing mine. Transformation’s preamble crunched and popped in my muscles and bones. My spine wanted out, craved its full lupine length. Nerves shivered in the sockets of my fingers and toes and there, like a heavy helmet, was the ghost of the monster’s skull around my own. I had one hand in the pocket of my smock, where, perhaps as a joke, perhaps as a no-hard-feelings gesture, Clint & co. had shoved Jake’s journal.

No mistaking where I was: Caleb’s freshly repulsive odour and the bucket’s mean spirit of piss, vomit and bleach, yes, home sweet home – but with a new olfactory twist: the suggestively pressing smell of human flesh and blood. I opened my eyes.

I was, of course, back in my old cell – but I wasn’t alone. Walker, thin, bruised, unshaven and stinking not just of living meat but stale excrement, urine and sweat, lay curled up in wrists-to-ankles restraints looped by a steel cable around the bars. He was so clearly incapable of doing anything the cuffs were an act of satire. Of the clothes he’d had on when they caught us only his pants remained, now filthy. His face was drained. The blue-green eyes were big and bright and fractured. One of them – the left – had a badly infected sty. It was the sort of irritant I knew he’d stopped noticing, the sort not big enough to register above the constant noise of the other injuries.

‘Oh God,’ I said.

‘Don’t touch me.’

Small words that said a big piece had shifted. Or died. It would’ve been less awful if his voice had changed, but it hadn’t. It was still him, deeply altered.

‘They brought him in today,’ Caleb whispered, not out of delicacy but because he could barely speak. I looked over at him. He was still in nothing but the white Adidas sweatpants. The pinkish sweat had dried. His skin was tight and translucent, veins livid. How many times in the cage since I’d been gone? A detached part of me was surprised to find him still alive. A not-so-detached part relieved.
Don’t get soft, idiot. You need him alive, that’s all
.

I turned back to Walker. ‘Hey,’ I said.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t want me. I was sending signals to everything in him he thought he’d let die. If he’d had a silver loaded gun at that moment he might have shot me just to stop the appeal to his dead self. He was terrified it might not be entirely dead, might start placing horrifying demands on him, or rather just the one horrifying demand: that he find room for what had happened to him without becoming someone completely different.

I wondered what he thought had been happening to me. Here I was, good as new, no scars to prove anything
had
happened to me. There he was, utterly changed. It was a betrayal, to have your own body erase the evidence of the abuse it had suffered. It made the evidence on the inside harder to bear. The evidence on the inside was like getting raped in broad daylight in a crowded street without a single witness.

Getting raped
. Telepathy like the shadow of a bird passing over us. Our eyes met. He looked away. I thought of a news story from years back, a Haitian prisoner sodomised with nightsticks and a fire hose in NYPD custody. Then a tumble of other images. The pictures of stripped and hooded detainees at Abu Ghraib. The peculiar glazed mirth of the MPs looking on. I wondered if Walker had it in him to recover from that kind of violation. If you were a woman a portion of your fear was given over, in installments that began when you were still a little girl, to rape. How not? Women got raped all over the world, every day. It was a structural latency. But not if you were a man. If you were a man you didn’t start worrying about rape until you were on your way to jail. Did that make it harder to absorb it when it happened? Men would think so.

The uselessness of saying anything was with us in the cell like a grinning genie. Walker ran his tongue over his cracked lips. His aura was meagre and wrongly concentrated, an effect like the bad breath of very ill person. All the charm and the glimmering history of the women who’d desired him was gone. It was as if someone had found the last hidden gold of his boyhood and ripped it out of him. I thought of him saying my name that night in the dark, unguardedly – Talulla? – the tenderness and delight that had ambushed me. I wanted to put my arms around him and I knew it was the last thing he wanted me to do. He didn’t want to be touched by anyone ever again, except perhaps brutally, to honour the vicious god who had visited him.