Chapter 7

Finding a job was easy: smile, lie and say ‘yes’. It always worked. And the days and nights on the road began again. Service stations, motorways, delivery bays at out-of-the-way factories, the odd night in cheap hotels and more, in the back of the van, in his sleeping-bag.
He picked them up in Belgium on his way to Saarbrücken: two noisy Dutch girls. They virtually ignored him, jabbering away to each other in their own language. It sounded like someone gargling porridge.
They were wearing loose tee-shirts and cut-off jeans and the other one had hairy legs. She also had short, wiry auburn hair. The first one had the arrogance of beauty. He was beginning to hate them profoundly.
Then they started talking to him in good English. Friendly. Everything changed. Was his hate really that invisible?
At the service station they stopped at for coffee, they lapsed back into Dutch. They were talking about him... laughing at him... Bitches. His hate revived itself. But he contained it. Even when he paid for the coffees.
Back on the road, he started pontificating.
“Don’t you think you’re asking for trouble, travelling around like that?”
“Like what? Hitch-hiking?”
“Well, that, a bit, but the way you’re dressed.”
The girls looked at each other in stifled disbelief.
“What do you mean: the way we’re dressed?”
“Take a look! You can see your thighs, your... well, look...”
They looked at each other again. Unable to restrain themselves, they burst into a flood of laughter.
“No. My dad travels to the States a lot and he’s given me a Mace.”
It was now Guy’s turn to laugh. Pictures of knights in shining armour and spiky metal balls on sticks and chains. He explained. All laughed together. They explained. Isn’t life fun.
“Never heard of it, let’s have a look.” He inspected it briefly, keeping an eye on the road, held it up to his left ear and shook it up and down. “What’s in it?”
“God knows, some sort of nerve gas, I think.”
It worked too. The two girls slumped against each other.
“Hmm…” he thought, “ought to get some of this.”
He pulled over and administered a further dose for safety, then drove off to find somewhere secluded.
A few increasingly minor side-roads later, he found what he wanted. Right: girl in the middle first. Didn’t want any disturbances. He wound some packing tape around her arms and legs, and then around her mouth, and waited. This used to be the unpleasant bit, now he just flicked through a magazine until the body stopped convulsing.
It was the other one he wanted, the blonde.
He climbed into the back and pulled her over the seat, then hooked up his curtain around the windows.
For a while he just looked at her. Her loud self-assured voice had gone now and she became almost pleasant. He stroked her face and smoothed her hair. It was long and beautiful. Sitting astride her thighs, he looked down at her expressionless face. It was relaxed and they were happy together. He would wake her with a kiss, and she would respond, pressing her lips against his, searching out the depths of sensation.
Nothing happened. He sent her a violent slap across the face. Her head banged against a box.
Methodically, he cut her clothes apart and took them off. Her breasts were spread out in a low mound. One in each hand, he fondled them, pressing the nipples between his fingers. Amazingly, they hardened. “Typical”, he thought, “even unconscious, they’re dying for it. Well, she’s going to get it: literally.
He took a condom from his travel bag. Don’t want to catch any diseases.
The skin between her thighs was cool and soft. He rubbed his face on it, moving his nose and cheek up and down, kissing from time to time.
He raped her.
Nothing.
All he felt was emptiness. Kneeling astride her once more, he gazed vacantly at her immobile body. His eyes stopped seeing and his jaw clenched.
His mind was blank and emotionless. There was nothing there. Why did he feel so cold, so empty?
Thoughts, obscure and fleeting, wandered around the corridors of his mind. Things he’d rather not think about.
Suddenly, his whole body tensed and his face screamed. Fists clenched, knuckles white, he hammered her body. Then stopped and took a deep breath through his teeth.
He was erect again. This time she was going to get it. He raped her a second time with hard, sudden thrusts, each one stabbing the bitch where it hurts. She started groaning. Guy was in control now. He pounded at her more and more and the girl’s senses started to resurface.
She looked at him, incomprehendingly at first, then aghast. When the reality of the situation finally filtered through her confused state, she started wriggling violently, trying to get him off. He punched her in the face, and she stopped. Her face contorted into the bloated loathing of somebody about to be sick. Every feature recoiled with the violated shock of the abused. The savagery of the blow set her whole body rigid with fear.
She was a good girl now and he lay flat on top of her. He began to kiss her face and lips. She turned away in disgust. Guy propped himself up and forced her to look at him. The threat in his face was pitiless. He bent down and kissed her on the lips. This time, she responded. Then flung her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately.
Something had happened inside. Like cleaning up excrement. When you have to deal with something utterly vile and repulsive, when you cannot even bear the thought of touching it, you have to close your mind, swallow and plunge in, become so immersed in the filth it can no longer affect you.
She was no longer being raped by a brute, her face did not hurt. They were making love, she and her lover. Spontaneous animal lust. Her mind was thrown into another world, one where the only way to survive was to merge, to blend in and become part of it.
And as the tension, the pace, mounted, his hands gripped her head and their tongues got lost in each other’s. Her nails dug into his back in frenzied urgency. His fingers squeezed and pressed against her cheeks. As they slowly tightened around her neck, the staccato groans became louder and louder. His fingers tightened, clenching harder and harder.
Her writhing became jerky and violent. She started struggling in terrified panic; arms flailing and back arched, she tried to escape. Tighter. Her body jerked in final airless agony, her muscles contracted. He shot in a paroxysm of release.
He fell on top of her inert body, exhausted. He lay there a long time, his heart-beat gradually returning to normal. The girl was dead.
It was not enough, still not enough. He felt nothing. Resting his face on hers, a pitiful tear squeezed itself out of his eye. Within seconds, he was sobbing loudly. He gripped the girl tightly, hugging her in a ferociously desperate travesty of contrition, wanting to apologise, to say sorry and kiss her back to life, to kiss everything better. It was too late, a lifetime too late.
It was the last time he ever cried.
In his agony, he filled his mouth with skin and bit. His mind numbed by the pain, he sucked and chewed unknowingly. He bit again, tearing off the flesh with a sharp wrench of the head. He was gone, maddened by the futile anger of his unspeakable, thwarted want. His eyes had dried and were blind to everything. He heard nothing, felt nothing, nothing except a huge aching emptiness burning his insides.
He fell asleep.

Fingers clawed at his face, slaps stung his cheeks to red. Weals of livid skin swelled up on his back, arms, legs and bottom. A red mouth opened gaping acid spittle dribbling at the corners. Hissed hatred, face smeared with shit, red-hot tongs biting into his arms, piercing the flesh and muscle, curved and flattened hooks dug in and flayed him. Piss spat at his raw, bleeding wounds. A Spanish boot wrapped itself around his skull and wedges of splintered wood were chocked in, rough stones hammering with relentless cruelty.
No punishment was enough. He was wicked, evil. A despicable brat who wet his bed and shat his underpants. A creeping, whining, crawling little leech, begging and whingeing. No punishment was good enough for him. You can’t be soft on that sort of boy. Make the punishment fit. And the crop came down in a slicing, longitudinal stroke, burying in to the flesh. It fit. Snugly.
No more stains; of any colour.
In his sleep, Guy cringed and whimpered. Lost in a night of total bewilderment, he understood nothing. He never had.
His sleep was restless. Physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion, or loathing, terror, shame... The dark turmoil spun him round, stretched him like molten rubber and he couldn’t get away. He tried to crawl up his arse, to find the only place suitable for him. Stretched on the rack while knife-pointed hammers smashed into his belly, he squirmed and fled into his mind, a world of grim, fabulous torment and inescapable pain. Steel claws crawled through his guts, slashing and snagging at his organs, biting into his heart and the red blood spurted out, ejaculated onto his face, covering him with unnameable slime.
Footsteps on the stairs; they were coming to get him. Slow, premeditatively slow paces. One by one.
Hide.
In the dark van, he screamed his quaking terror at the top of his voice and the rush of air and broken glass rasped his lungs and blasted his throat. Not a sound came out.
And panic, the mindless panic of urgent fear, the sweating, gibbering terror of hysteria poured into his head like boiling bubbles of incandescent iron. Pig iron.
The bodies! He had to hide them. His fevered mind raced around looking for something to put them in. He pulled at an arm to throw the body over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. The arm came off. It was decomposing already. The stench of rotting flesh bathed in a grovelling soup of white maggots hit his nostrils. The arm would fit in a drainpipe! The rain would wash it away! Hacking and scooping with his bare hands, he tore off the sick meat and thrust it down the toilet, pulling the chain like a demented Quasimodo. Burial at sea. Walk the plank, slide the plank, pour the putrefying, fetid gunge over the gunwale. Heave ho me hearties! Yo ho ho and a bottle of scum.
Chained to the wooden grid on the poop. Arms roped apart, shirt ripped off and a plug of lead between his teeth. The cat, the cat! Screams of laughter filled the air. But he could escape the whip. He pulled and his left arm came off at the socket, blood dribbled down his side. He left his other wrist and hand behind and stepped out of his ankles. A fiery chase. He had to run faster and faster to keep from losing balance. He was getting nowhere. He tried to run but couldn’t, his legs wouldn’t move. He looked down. The stumps were glued to the planks in a brown mess. Now they could whip him. He wouldn’t get away this time.

Guy woke. Daylight was filtering in through the curtains. He had to get away. He pulled on his clothes, slipped into the driver’s seat and drove off. He had to find somewhere to get rid of the bodies. The van sped around the country lanes, hunting out an isolated spot. He tried forest trails and turned back each time: cars or people.
His panic was real this time. Two fucking corpses in the back and what happens if he breaks down or runs out of petrol? He looked at the gauge: quarter.
He came onto a main road. A blue flash. He looked in the rear-view mirror. The flash went red. His left cheek was smeared with caked-up blood. The police car could feel the magnetic pull of his guilt and was homing in. At last. It was over. He’d have to tell, they’d force him to tell. His brain filled with a bursting urge to confess, now, immediately, a dragon-like need to be caught and forced to tell all. Release. Anything but bear the uncertainty, the not knowing, the immense quivering doubt so intolerable it had to mean discovery. They were watching, they knew. He knew.
The police car went blindly past. He almost felt hurt. Weakly, he flashed his headlamps, a last attempt. The car disappeared into the distance.
Another car brought him to his senses. He took another side-road and eventually found a woodland track where he stopped and parked. He looked round cautiously: nobody. He spat in his hand and wiped his face, removing most of the blood, then drove on looking for a puddle.
He washed the rest off then took hold of some grass and pulled. Mixing earth with water, he produced a nice thick mud and splattered the number-plates beyond recognition; they no longer even looked French. Back in the van, he followed the track for another kilometre until he could turn round. For a minute or two, he scrutinised the surroundings, it was safe. He dragged the girls into a dense crowd of ferns, straightened up the vegetation as best he could, threw a pile of fronds over the bodies and drove off.
Later, he put the clothes and condoms in a metal waste bin on a deserted lay-by, siphoned a cupful of petrol and added a match. Evidence?...
Everything was neat and tidy when he reached Saarbrücken to deliver his last parcels, where he apologised and phoned his boss to explain the breakdown.
Things can be so simple when you keep your head. ¶ 2:03 AM