“Yes.”
“But you —”
“I know.”
“No power for you, Gregory.”
“No.”
“It’s not the end of the world. Look at me.”
“Not at the moment, if you don’t mind.”
Burgess kept walking, steady step upon steady step. Keep it calm, keep it rational.
“Look at me, please,” Hell cooed.
“Later, sir.”
“I’m only asking you to look at me. A little respect would be appreciated.”
“I will. I will, really. Later.”
The corridor divided here. Burgess took the left-hand fork. He thought the symbolism might flatter. It was a cul-de-sac.
Burgess stood still facing the wall. The cold air was in his marrow, and the stumps of his thumbs were really giving him up. He took off his gloves and sucked, hard.
“Look at me. Turn and look at me,” said the courteous voice.
What was he to do now? Back out of the corridor and find another way was best, presumably. He’d just have to walk around and around in circles until he’d argued his point sufficiently well for his pursuer to leave him be.
As he stood, juggling the alternatives available to him, he felt a slight ache in his neck.
“Look at me,” the voice said again.
And his throat was constricted. There was, strangely, a grinding in his head, the sound of bone rasping bone. It felt like a knife was lodged in the base of his skull.
“Look at me,” Hell said one final time, and Burgess’ head turned.
Not his body. That stayed standing facing the blank wall of the cul-de-sac.
But his head cranked around on its slender axis, disregarding reason and anatomy. Burgess choked as his gullet twisted on itself like a flesh rope, his vertebrae screwed to powder, his cartilage to fibre mush. His eyes bled, his ears popped, and he died, looking at that sunless, unbegotten face.
“I told you to look at me,” said Hell, and went its bitter way, leaving him standing there, a fine paradox for the democrats to find when they came, bustling with words, into the Palace of Westminster.
JACQUELINE ESS:
HER WILL AND TESTEMENT
MY GOD, SHE thought, this can’t be living. Day in, day out: the boredom, the drudgery, the frustration.
My Christ, she prayed, let me out, set me free, crucify me if you must, but put me out of my misery
In lieu of his euthanasian benediction, she took a blade from Ben’s razor, one dull day in late March, locked herself in the bathroom, and slit her wrists.
Through the throbbing in her ears, she faintly heard Ben outside the bathroom door.
“Are you in there, darling?”
“Go away,” she thought she said.
“I’m back early, sweetheart. The traffic was light.”
“Please go away.”
The effort of trying to speak slid her off the toilet seat and on to the white-tiled floor, where pools of her blood were already cooling.
“Darling?”
“Go.”
“Darling.”
“Away.”
“Are you all right?”
Now he was rattling at the door, the rat. Didn’t he realize she couldn’t open it, wouldn’t open it?
“Answer me, Jackie.”
She groaned. She couldn’t stop herself. The pain wasn’t as terrible as she’d expected, but there was an ugly feeling, as though she’d been kicked in the head. Still, he couldn’t catch her in time, not now. Not even if he broke the door down.
He broke the door down.
She looked up at him through an air grown so thick with death you could have sliced it.
“Too late,” she thought she said.
But it wasn’t.
My God, she thought, this can’t be suicide. I haven’t died. The doctor Ben had hired for her was too perfectly benign. Only the best, he’d promised, only the very best for my Jackie.
“It’s nothing,” the doctor reassured her, “that we can’t put right with a little tinkering.”
Why doesn’t he just come out with it? she thought. He doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t know what it’s like.
“I deal with a lot of these women’s problems,” he confided, fairly oozing a practiced compassion. “It’s got to epidemic proportions among a certain age-bracket.”
She was barely thirty. What was he telling her? That she was prematurely menopausal?
“Depression, partial or total withdrawal, neuroses of every shape and size. You’re not alone, believe me.”