Golgotha, W14

I think I might be dying. On the floor above me Saskia is being fucked silly by a client. I can tell because of the rata-tat-tat booming through my ceiling. I wonder if it’s the same one as last week — the insurance broker with the terrific haunches and the Prince Charming chin. The one who looked as I always imagined Tybalt must look before John Leguizamo ruined it for me. Soon a groan will sound and the rata-tat-tat will stop and then I can go back to dying in peace.

I think I might be dying because my head is now pounding in time with the rata-tat-tat, my body is on fire, my mouth tastes like copper and my bed is wet with sweat and piss. Dear Jesus how I must stink.

The inevitable groan heralds the end of the rata-tat-tat. Soon after I hear would-be Tybalt’s terrific haunches on the landing outside my door. They fade away down the stairs. Each step practically rocks the whole building. Saskia appears in in my doorway. Frazzled hair. Bathrobe. Tall and greyhound thin with her cheeks drawn tight about her skull like a bulimic supermodel.

‘He told me his shot-put record at his old school still hasn’t been broken, you know.’ She saunters across the room. When she flops on the bed beside me I smell the reek of sex.

‘Oh Darling,’ she says. ‘I’m worn out.’

‘One day I’ll take you away from all this, Saskia,’ I manage to say through the taste of copper in my mouth. ‘We’ll move to a small town and open an artisan café. I’ll curate the coffee and make the sandwiches. You’ll bake fresh bread every morning. At night we’ll shutter the place, cover the floor in pillows and rent it out to the local swinger’s club.’

‘What rot you talk, Darling. You smell of urine, by the way.’

‘Saskia,’ I croke. ‘I might be dying.’

‘Don’t be silly, Darling. I’ve got money for the rent now. You can take it down as soon as you get out of bed.’

‘I can take it down? I can’t even feel my legs.’

‘You’ll have to. I have another client coming in twenty minutes. At the very least I must brush my teeth.’

‘But…’

‘But nothing. Here.’ She stuffs a wad of twenties into my limp hand. ‘You could buy the groceries too, for lunch. And some milk. And plenty of citrus fruits. I think I might have scurvy.’

So it goes. Out on the street it takes a good minute for the pain to recede from my eyes. Thank Christ for aviator sunglasses. I sort of hobble down the street with cars whizzing past me. This street is always busy, even at night the cars never stop coming. It must be the early afternoon by now. A young woman with a buggy comes towards me. For a second she stops and looks at me before crossing to the other side of the street. Good Mother. She can sense the death on me like the smell of the plague in a mud-walled hut.

By the time I get to the letting agent’s office my tongue is a sea cucumber lolling from my half open mouth. The taste of copper is still in my throat. The sweat is pissing from my armpits and my body really might fall apart at the seams any second.

‘Rent for flat six-A, one hundred-seventeen, Scarsdale Villas.’ On hearing the address the middle-aged woman behind the desk looks at me like I might have slapped her baby.

‘Wait here,’ she says, before she disappears through the frosted glass door behind her. I can hear her whispering in there, behind the door. So much time passes I lean on the desk because of the pain shooting up the back of my legs. I did say to you before how I think I might be dying.

Through the frosted door comes The Albanian. Fat, sleeves rolled up, two day growth of silver stubble sprouting from his jaw. The middle-aged woman peeps from behind his shoulder, looking at me like now the justice is coming for her slapped baby.

‘You need to pay two-hundred fifteen pounds,’ says The Albanian.

‘I need to pay you what? The rent is one-hundred seventy pounds per week.’

‘You need to pay two hundred fifteen pounds. One-hundred-seventy-five for rent, forty-five for administration fee.’

‘Administration fee? For what? This wasn’t part of our rental agreement.’ The Albanian makes a holy show of sniffing the air around me.

‘For cleaning,’ he says. ‘I need to pay the maid extra to make your place hygienic.’

‘For the maid?’ I say, and Slapped Baby’s eyes narrow at me. Suddenly the origin of the look becomes quite clear. ‘Now look here. If it’s a matter of hygiene there’s no reason to ask for more. I’ll clean the place myself if that’s what it takes.’

The Albanian slaps the counter-top.

‘No. No amateur. You pay me two-hundred fifteen right now or I kick you out of the flat this second.’

‘OK OK,’ I say. ‘Calm down. Let me see if I have enough.’

‘You better,’ The Albanian says. I pull from my pocket the wad of twenties. I count them. Eleven total. Two-hundred-twenty pound from one client? Broker-Tybalt must have depraved impulses. I hand over the wad. The Albanian counts it and gives me back a crumpled five and pockets the rest. He and Slapped Baby look at me expectantly.

‘You’re welcome,’ I say before I leave.

I head down the main street away from the flat toward the market. By the time I get there the ache in the back of my legs has concentrated exclusively in my knees. With every step it feels as though I’m a crepe-paper rip away from femur-tibia detachment.

They know me in the market. From behind the counter in the corner cash-and-carry the thin Eritrean gives me a toothy grin. With the crumpled fiver I purchase from this man:

1 kilogramme white potatoes at £1

1 litre whole milk at £0.89

1 bag of lemons at £0.99

The Eritrean bags them and gives me my change. Two pounds, eleven pence. I make my way toward the other side of the market. I need to buy meat and, whilst it’s true that I pass at least three butchers on my way, because of The Albanian they are all too expensive for me. The really most-cheap butchers is hidden away at the bottom of a wet, rubbish strewn alley-way. ‘Lake Nyos Meat and Fish International’ reads a plastic sign above it’s narrow shopfront.

‘Help you, sah?’ says the man in the bloodstained white overcoat.

‘Yes you can, sah, I’d like to buy some meat.’

‘Verree good, sah. We have good offers on cow meat today. This –’ he points to a lump of beef marbled through with yellow fat — ‘is the rib eye. Very good meat. Is eleven-ninety-nine a kilo. Best price. ‘

‘Have you got anything a little bit cheaper?’ I say, brusquely as if I’m actually choosing to go cheaper.

‘Very good Sah. Yes we have the rump steak. Seven-ninety-nine a kilo. Verree cheap.’

I say nothing and scan the rest of the cuts of meat. Minced beef for five-ninety-nine. Chicken legs for four-ninety-nine. Pig knuckles for three-sixty-nine. In the corner I see a lump of pale pink meat shot through with white fat and bone for one ninety nine a kilo.

‘What is that?’ I say, pointing at it.

‘That, sah, is the goat neck. Very good for soup.’

‘Goat neck? Wonderful. Just what I was looking for. I’ll take half a kilo.’

‘Very good, sah.’ He carries the lump to a board behind him, takes a machete from a rack on the wall, raises it high over his head and CHOP. He bags it and hands it over to me and I give him a pound.

By the time I get to the edge of the market my shoulders sting from the weight of the grocery bags. When finally our building comes into view I know the feeling of Our Lord Jesus Christ on the last hundred metres up Calvary hill. I’m about to actually die, to slip beyond into the next great mystery. Then a funny thing happens: The front door of our building opens and a kid of about fifteen runs out, shirtless, and bolts down the street away from me. And then a window in the second floor — my window — opens and the bulimic supermodel head of Saskia pops out.

‘Come back here, you brat,’ it squeals after the kid. The head turns, alights on me. ‘DON’T JUST STAND THERE. GET AFTER HIM.’ Now I’m already about to collapse from the weight of the potatoes, the meat, the lemons and the milk and I’m dehydrated because my armpits are still pissing sweat. So when I try to run it becomes a limping crack-head trot with the plastic shopping bags swinging at my sides. I make it about twenty metres before I trip and go head first into the pavement.

‘CHRISSAKES GET UP,’ Saskia squeals from the window. I’m not going anywhere. Let them come and take me away and bury me and be done with it.

Hands grip me beneath the arms and carry me inside. My head hurts. I flop on the bed in the cold reeking damp. Saskia mops my forehead with a freezing cold wet cloth.

‘You cretin. Why did you trip? That kid ran away without paying me.’ Somehow through the haze of pain and the being near to death I find the vitality to be angry. Like I decided to trip. Like anyone decides to do that.

‘What have I told you?’ I bawl. ‘Don’t do anything until you get the cash.’

‘I didn’t. The kid gave me a white envelope at the beginning. I was only after, when he suddenly really wanted to get dressed that I thought to look in it. If only you had caught him,’ she says as her voice cracks into a slow sob. That gets me, really, the sob.

‘It’s OK,’ I say, even though it isn’t. ‘Did you manage to get the groceries inside too?’

‘Yes,’ she says. One tear breaks form her eyes and rolls slowly down the protrusion of her cheekbone.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Well why don’t you get some water boiled and we’ll have some dinner?’

‘OK,’ she says, and sniffs stoically. ‘Do you have money for the gas metre?’

‘Yeah.’ I reach into my pocket and fumble out the one pound coin I have left over from the groceries. She looks at me expectantly for a few seconds.

‘Isn’t there any more of it?’ she says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s it.’

‘But how?’ she says, and I can hear the sobbing in her voice. I explain about The Albanian and Slapped Baby. She searches my face for a full ten seconds before she speaks again. ‘OK. A pound should be enough for at least one good meal.’ I hear her footsteps in the hallway and the clang of pots in our kitchenette. You might not know it, but to continue on without self-pity when you go from thinking you had fifty pounds to one pound takes tremendous grapes.

I come out of my snooze to the smell of boiled goat neck. We are stranded on a desert island. I have just butchered and murdered our companion. We’ve decided to take a snout to toe approach to him. Reasoning that the foot cannot possibly taste better with age we decide to cook it first. We boil it in seawater. This is as close as I can come to describing the smell of unseasoned, boiled goat neck.

We eat at the tiny rickety table beside the kitchenette. We eat potatoes boiled in their skin, the goat neck, water with a dash of lemon in it, and warmed milk. Each of us, unabashed by our shared company, pick the pieces up with our hands and gnaw like dogs on them. With goat neck you have to fight for every morsel of meat, tearing the grey flesh from the cracks between the knotted vertebra and cartilage, chomping through connective tissue and sinewy knuckle. I strip the flesh from the bones faster than Saskia. Then I mash the potatoes up with my fork and shovel them into my gob. I start and finish the hot frothy milk in one gulp.

Still hungry. My Stomach feels emptier than it did before I ate. It is the humming engine of a Humvee and it needs more fuel. When Saskia goes to the sink to get more water I switch one of my stripped goat vertebra for a comparatively fleshy one from her plate. By the time she’s back down in her seat I’ve stripped it of most of its digestible flesh.

‘Well Darling,’ she says. ‘What are we going to do now about money?’

Ordinarily we’d just sit back and wait for the phone to ring. This would work now were it not for the battery in the phone being dead and the dial on our pay as you go electricity metre resting exactly on zero.

*

Further west the property prices dive. The houses shift in shape and size to two-story semi-detached for miles and miles around. We’re not really in London now, not as I consider it.

‘Darling,’ says Saskia, turning her nose up in the air. ‘Where on earth are you taking me?’ Saskia obviously senses the shift in demographic too. The thing about Saskia is for all this ‘Darling’ crap and the costume drama accent, she’s more at home here than the part of London we currently live in. She’s a lower middle class girl posing as one of the Tatler bunch so she can make the whoring appear more romantic. It’s like she has to pretend to be posh to further separate who she is from what she does. I don’t challenge her on it. So long as she brings in the money she can pretend to be from Mars for all I care.

‘Some place where the market isn’t totally saturated,’ I say. When we get out of the car we’re opposite a row of shops. Dusk has arrived and orange light bathes the betting shops, mobile phone repair places, South-Asian sweet shops and curry houses. On the corner of this row of shops is a small pub. In the door of the pub two men –grey haired, thin southern English proletarians — the type who look like they might have something to do with illegal dog racing and car-boot sales — stand smoking. They look at us or, perhaps more accurately, they devour Saskia with their eyes. Her scrawny pale legs flow from a tiny pink cotton skirt into disco-ball stilettoes. Her druggie-toned stomach separates the skirt from a red halter-top. She senses their eyes and breaks into a whore-strut with her hands on her hips and her shoulders rolling. It’s exactly the type of movement someone with only a theatrical experience of streetwalking would use, but it does the trick. The men can’t take their eyes off her. Of course, this might be because their erotic desires are mingled with the urge to muzzle her and have her chase an electric rabbit.

I have Saskia strut past them around the corner to the alleyway and the old broken down wall by the canal. I drift far enough away so as not to spook them and wait. After a while a stout, brick red man walks out of the pub and sort of rolls around the corner. Saskia gives him a big smile and points with her chin toward the canal. The man says something. Saskia turns and walks in the direction of the canal. The man follows her.

After about ten minutes the man reappears and rolls back toward the pub. Saskia emerges a minute or two later. It isn’t long before another man emerges from the pub. Again the smile, the nod and the slow re-emergence. This happens two more times before police a car cruises past very slowly. I call it a day and beckon Saskia back toward me.

‘Darling,’ Saskia says on the way home. ‘Do you know that wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be? They were all rather polite, tender, even. The last one only wanted to kiss. I closed my eyes and imagined Tom Hardy.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ I mumble. Now that the crisis of the money is over I go back to struggling with my imminent demise. My bowels are no longer inside me. Ice cold water has taken their place. I can feel the freeze radiate from it, spreading with slow assurance through my veins into my upper and lower extremities. When it reaches the tips of my toes, my fingers, my crown and the head of my penis I will die. Dear Sweet Jesus I don’t want to die. By instinct I make the sign of the cross.

‘Darling,’ Saskia says. ‘What was that?’

‘What was what?’ I say.

‘Did you just bless yourself?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Oh come on,’ she says. ‘I know you just blessed yourself.’

‘Well what of it?’ I say.

‘You’re not still on that “I’m dying” trajectory, are you?’

A long moment of silence passes between us.

‘No-o. It’s good be prepared though,’ I say.

‘Poor baby,’ she places the bones of her hand on mine. ‘Saskia won’t let you die. Never-ever-ever-ever.’

When we get home she has to support me on our rickety staircase. The cold in my stomach has advanced to my knee-caps and the points of my elbows. She lets me drift into the urine damp bed. By God it is freezing.

‘Close the window,’ I say. She does. She throws on her bathrobe and leaves for the corner shop. She comes back and proudly shows me a pouch of rolling tobacco, more milk, kalamata olives, hummus, Turkish bread, frozen fish-fingers, a jar of instant coffee, a bottle of cheap gin, three bottles of rosé, phone credit and change for the gas and electricity metres.

‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she says. ‘And then we’ll have a proper dinner.’ Pans clash and cupboards open in the kitchen. I lie on the bed and shiver with the sea-cucumber tongue hanging from my mouth. She comes and leads me down the hall to the communal bathroom. She undresses me softly like I were a child and lays me in the hot water. I see through the parting in her bathrobe that she hasn’t changed since we got back. I think I can still whiff sex and canal-bank mud on her. She rubs shampoo into my hair, dips a jug into the bath water and pours it slowly over my head. The warm water runs like velvet down my back.

‘I’ll leave you here to soak while I get dinner ready,’ she says.

I allow myself to sink further into the tub. I can feel the ice water retreating up my legs toward my stomach, the warmth slowly returning to my arms, blood circulating in my crown. I might just live to see tomorrow but I don’t know for sure. I think I might be dying.