I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  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 – b
ut 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.

  Now the killer found that he was at an interior point in himself, looking down at the blood-puddled floor, at the girl’s body, where his self-image (of which he was immensely proud) bothered him vaguely; he felt that something inside him was hammering to get his attention from the wrong side of his steel door – some entity that was starving, excluded and ignored. It was himself, of course, though he had no means of realising that. He had always had very serious problems with himself indeed on practically every level and always would have, because he possessed no equipment whatever by means of which he could identify any problem. Problems manifested themselves with him, as they do with the residents in a lunatic asylum, as no problem, which is why they are in the asylum. The problem is themselves, and it is too great for them to solve – that lust, that vague unidentifiable sadness, the sudden lost feeling or the savage desire to kill or pick someone else’s nose, shit in a crowded train. Well, if you have no idea what a problem is, it is extremely unlikely that you will ever be able to solve it. In this case, the killer presented the classic bore’s syndrome that of literally clinging to existence through having no memory of it – in other words, by having an exact memory of the present and none whatever of the past. This provided him – but only him – with an illusion of living: everyone who detected that it in fact was nothing but an illusion had to go, and that was when the sports bag was unzipped. The only way he managed to fill this gap and exist at all was by his exact memory in the present, and none whatever of the past, which provided him with the illusion of living while he absently suffered and caused pain. By definition, however, there was no possibility whatever of his changing, let alone improving his position in any direction – for how can anyone ever hope to be freed from a situation that he doesn’t understand?

  Bores and killers are much the same; dullness and despair explains most murders. Killers kill because they spew out far too much energy on being polite in a way that normal people never do. Most killers are of bourgeois origin or, worse still, have been forced in a working-class atmosphere to making a copy of it. I have never met one single stimulating killer in all my time with A14; and if you’ve never met one there, then I very much doubt if you will meet one anywhere.

  With this killer, there were very, very serious sexual problems of whose origins he had no idea, of course, since he was unable to analyse them. One form his trouble took (if it had just stopped there!) was the absolute, though unconscious hatred he bore towards the one part of himself over which, even though it was attached to him, he had no control: his prick. He had started to punish it on that account while he was still very young – ever since the first time, in fact, that it was challenged by a woman to do its stuff and failed. It let him down like a flat tyre the first time he ever tried it out when he was fifteen, at that first dread moment in a young man’s life when, thanks to its steadfast and utter refusal to come up, part of his body proved him not to be the superior being that the rest of him thought he was. Quite the contrary: this shrunken yet vital little portion of him lolled feebly, as it had done ever since, with a negative yet controlling insolence, given the situation, against his thigh like an old pisspot leaning on a bar, more or less winking at him as it were in a sly manner, daring him to do something about it. In the end he had given it such a stout slap that he screamed with his self-inflicted pain and the girl fled before the negative glory of his impotence, so that the first penal blood he ever shed was his own. The being that he had already thought he possessed very sensibly rushed out of the room and away from that cheap Caledonian Road hotel.

  He made an error and wept with the next girl, having waited, psychically asleep, for nearly a year after that. May was on the fat side and wore glasses that steamed up – she was known as Preshy to her very few friends, Fleshy to her numerous enemies, since she was a known grass and had already taken one heavy beating for playing out of her league. Her new error was to take this sport on because no one else would despite his good looks, and besides she was getting a bit desperate for a fuck. These looks of his, though, she gradually noticed, soon kind of vanished under inspection and she also found herself having to deal with other problems such as his spontaneous outbursts of maniacal fury; they were of an order she had never come across before. Her own problem was the twin one of both being sly so as to encourage trouble and then lying back to try and enjoy it; she was too stupid ever to realise that he was silent and well behaved in the boozers they went to only because he was trying to understand what natural behaviour meant through watching the people around him with exactly the same purpose and intensity as a bad actor, in an effort to make a copy of what he could never become.

  Anyway, the first time they did both find themselves flat on a hotel bed at the end of an evening of half bitters, she expertly unsnapped her bra and black dotted clingers and knickers and kicked her flat heels into a corner. They started to cuddle, half-clothed; but the preliminaries seemed to her to last for an awfully long time, which depressed her. She was still sorry for him, but physically his efforts made her start to go off him; she thought, This is getting to look like the makings of a disaster area here if blokey doesn’t perform soon and he’s so sort of boring – only, being stupid, she was innocent and had no idea of what she was literally playing with, no idea how urgent it was with him that he should conquer her. Hers was a very dangerous ignorance indeed – indeed it was mortal, for when he broke out weeping to her after hours in the dark, complaining of not being able to make himself work in spite of hours of sweating effort, she committed a truly majestic error; she flung herself off the mattress and gave him the raspberry because she was exhausted, dissatisfied and fed up with struggling under him.

  It was the last thing she ever did. As with all his past and future women – he was never sure right up to the end whether it was eleven or twelve – May died; and she died because what she had asked of him was not the extraordinary, but the impossible – a good, square, old-fashioned fuck. She had no idea at all what she was dealing with; it was as if you had asked a schoolteacher to defuse a rotting but live bomb. Indifferently, the killer still remembered her at times, sniffed the knickers he had worn on that occasion, which he kept at College Hill with his souvenirs, then shook his head and smiled at the idea as though she were just part of a story he had read in a book or seen on television, saying to himself, Just look at that now, will you? She must have been like that little mystery in that serial on Channel 4 that he watched silently in the pub, where the feller cut just a shade too deep, so that she bled too fast and was gone too quick. That was the trouble with nearly all of them, they were hardly any of them up to it, except just one or two little toughies in some k
ind of training who put up something like a battle; the rest of them just sliced up like wet fish, gave off that gargle of theirs and died before you were anywhere near your own climax, might you be so lucky, mazel tov.

  So that’s how it was. He took no more precautions than the normal not to be caught, any more than a girl does going on and off the pill. He performed whenever he knew he had to perform, which was when he was unable to control himself, and then read about it next day in the press, casually, even with the attitude of a serious citizen, since, because he was now asleep again, there was no way, no way at all, that this creature folk were describing as a monster could possibly be him. Also, the reporting was really lousy, and the police work made you wonder how the fuzz ever nailed anyone for anything the stupid way they set about it.

  And that was why he had never had his collar felt. As far as he was concerned the culprit was someone totally and absolutely unknown to him despite the shocking litter of relics, the smell, a head from time to time that stood around on an old plate for a while till the pong really got too fierce and it had to be junked. There were even moments, when he read about the exploits of this person in the press, when he muttered to himself, You bet, this bastard’s got to be caught, he’s a fucking animal. True, he had fleeting feelings that whoever had gutted this poor little bat here on page one was some other geezer that he might know just vaguely; he wasn’t sure, but didn’t he go out with a very nice-looking dark feller that he met in the boozer from time to time and then they both went out on a dragging spree? He would have to have a word with this feller about it next time they met, whatever his name was, he probably had lots. Still, give the mate a bit of margin – after all, just like himself, he was only going for a stroll, ripping off a bit of bird, it was the kind of thing the whole world did the whole bleeding time, why be choked if a bit of vinegar gets upset?