Excerpt: Bloody Management

Nicholas Dart immediately knew what he was supposed to do and not to do, in this place: he was supposed to work at the desk on his laptop. He was not supposed to look out the window. He was supposed to hold meetings with one or two executives or colleagues at the small table. He was supposed to put some books in the shelf, books that made him look informed, reading, smart. He was not supposed to shag a female staff member on either his desk or on the small table. He was supposed to keep his door closed during confidential meetings. He was not supposed to open the windows and scream his anger out or jump from them to a certain death. He was supposed to take his coffee from the hallway where the company provided machines with fourteen different types of caffeinated drink into his office. He was not supposed to leave the paper cups standing around anywhere. He was supposed to throw them in the wet waste basket next to the machine. He was not supposed to put art or posters he liked up on the wall instead or in addition to the choice made for him by the corporation. He was supposed to place photographs of his family, if he had them, on the desk. He was not supposed to leave a pair of handcuffs or a buttplug, if he had them, laying around on that desk. It was a small world with few rules, every thing signifying an action or the suppression of an action, and quite possibly also the thought leading to such an action. It was an environment that denied the existence or necessity of personal creativity and expression, because his day was meant to be busy, and keep him busy, in the name of the company. It was more or less liked any office he’d ever worked in, and it confirmed Nicholas’ belief that he could predict the next five years, apart from the human relationships, which also filled this place and brought it to life, against the odds prescribed by the rules catalogue.

[...]

The trouble was, that book had not been written yet, and perhaps would never be written. Not because Nicholas was lazy (he wasn’t), not because he had to support a large family of five (he didn’t have to), not because he didn’t have anything to say (he did), or because he’d not be able to articulate it…but because Nicholas could not see himself sufficiently entitled to write, to live inside that writer’s mind. Though, in fact, he already possessed the right mind, and it was working, working away like a pianist’s fingers on the keyboard during a Mozart piano sonata passage in Allegro molto.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the writer’s mind that he was missing. Perhaps it was his father’s beard, his father’s face, or his mother’s hand on his face. Nicholas’ parents had disappeared during a flood. It was a memorable scene, fixed in his memory anyway: how his father, then a young strapper, passed baby Nicholas to his wife, who passed it to her sister Agatha one moment before a giant wave took the couple out to sea, never to be seen again. A painless, sightless, still parting from one’s loved ones if there was any. Nothing but this scene had ever been imparted on him by his uncle and aunt, and it weighed heavy on Nicholas’ chest like an entire ocean.

By now, he’d gotten used to both the longing to write and to the absence of it. What he called his inability to do what he most wanted to do defined his character more than anything else apart from his loneliness, which was only interrupted by weekly dinners with his surviving family. This family was as small as one could imagine, since both his uncle and aunt had no other siblings and had not had children. Nicholas often felt, under his breath, under the flap of his heart, that they were just waiting for another wave that would reunite them with those who had already gone out there, wherever.

[...]

As she walked through the entrance hall of her Chelsea appartement house, she glanced at herself in the mirror. This was an old movie trick, she realised, and one she cherished: the female lead, whose deeper motives would not become clear until much later in the story, needed to check in with herself, and the viewer needed to check in with her – not through one of those full-face-all-wrinkles-and-pores shots of the head, but instead by following her discreetly, as she, with the same degree of discreetness, glanced at herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw and she didn’t like it at once: a pale face looked at her framed by a black thing frazzled at the temples – this was her hair; the nose seemed to peek out of the dough-white mass like a periscope (perhaps there were little grey-uniformed men hidden behind it, who followed her around); the eyes, green marble-like eyes, were shadowed by too much mascara as if they were looking for an excuse not to shine. She held her head like a bird, slightly forward from the shoulders, at an odd angle, as if she were a bird threatened by extinction. Maybe she was. She felt intensely Napoleonic at this moment, and the mirror with its brown chiseled mahagony frame (what else!) and its glass, which had a foreboding of its coming blindness, underlined that sentiment from which it was only a tiny step towards Hestia’s secretly held, but strongly and boldly defended view that she might be the reincarnated counterdraft to Jane Austen. Jane Austen without the talent for writing, but with the soul of that most sinister sister of all women writers. That Austen had been sinister was the only rational conclusion that could be drawn from her novels: hadn’t she encouraged the females of her time to rebel against social injustice and relinquish a position that women had occupied for hundreds of years? Hestia saw herself as the keeper of the flame, the calm center of the household, the place to which the man, the hunter, could return when the elements in general, and his drive in particular, were beginning to overpower him. She viewed man as the crown of creation and herself as a willing helper and bearer of children, a heroine more like Goethe’s Lotte than Austen’s Lizzy or Emma. She moved on, past the historic magical mirror and, walking upstairs instead of taking the elevator, felt her barrenness constrict her like a tight, unadorned belt. She dreaded the emptiness of her appartement, and she wished she could stay home instead and await the arrival of her prince, no, her king, ready to bring him his slippers, take him by the hand, lead him to a set table and receive, in return, the praise and the adoration befitting a goddess of the hearth.

[...]

When Hestia was eight, her father took her to a boxing match. It was a Heavyweight World Champion fight:

“Two really big guys are going to hit each other in the face and one must win”, he told her. He was practically foaming at the mouth with excitement, and so she was excited too, not knowing what to expect, really.

They had the best tickets, right at the ring, because her father was a lawyer who knew a lawyer who worked for the company that put on the fight. “This is big money, Hesty”, her father remarked, using her least favourite nickname, “really big money.”

There was a lot of talk about money in her family: mother complained about not getting paid enough through her Royalties – but when she asked her about the Royals, her mom only laughed.

“Not Royals, stupid, Royalties – money”, she cried, almost choking on her coffee. She was always drinking coffee, strong coffee, and she smelled of coffee mixed with cigarettes. Even now, after more than thirty years, Hestia still wanted to smoke if only to smell like her mother. Her father only talked about not talking about money, since he hated talking about it. He liked making it, though: “Your father is very good at making money, which is why you’ll never have to worry about anything”, her mother said, and: “Money isn’t everything but it’s good to have more of it.”

Then came the fight, the big money fight of the big guys. And big they were, not only for an eight-year-old. Hestia had put on special clothes: this was the first time her father had taken her out. She used a few things of her mother’s: emerald earrings playing nicely off her green eyes, and a black feather tiara. “Can I wear this”, she asked her mother, who was writing and only waved at Hestia, her mind having wandered off somewhere else.

Five minutes after taking her seats, Hestia was perspiring like never before and she thought she’d choke from the air which was heavy with smoke and the sweat and ire of two thousand people. She was uncomfortable and bored. Her father was gesticulating to his friend, who sat next to him: he showed how he’d take out the Russian: “A right jab when he’s outreached himself!”

When the two boxers were in the ring, Hestia saw that one of them, a black guy, was a lot shorter than the other one, who looked too calm to be hitting anyone in the face, a boy with giant hands and giant feet.

“This guy is a whopping nine inches taller!”, she heard her father say to his friend. They were both smoking cigars and her father seemed to have forgotten she was there. So that were nine inches. The black guy reached but to the chest of the other one. Still, they were both incredibly big. Hestia had thought her father large, but these two looked frightful.

About half an hour later – she had put her hands over her eyes - she felt something fall in her lap, making a funny sound as it made contact with the tiara, and Hestia thought ‘how funny I should be able to hear this with all the noise’. She dropped her hands and picked it up: it was a bloody tooth.

[...]

Ms Barebones was implicated in Nicholas’ earliest conscious oedipal fantasies and longings for touching a fully grown woman’s everything everywhere: the small, vulnerable place between her breasts, the less vulnerable but highly arousing tiny yard around her nipples, her slighly rounded neck where the black hair ended and before her dresses, which seemed endlessly transparent, caleidoscopically so, and, of course, the forbidden but ever so sweet space between her legs where he assumed her bush to be just as black as the hair on her head. Alas, Ms Barebones, who wore heavy perfume, which infused and poisoned the air in the classroom exactly where Nicholas was sitting, staring up at her, for example when he dropped a pen to get a peek at her legs and the shirt, on the off chance that said shirt was riding up her legs in that very moment, was married, married to a brutish-looking man about three times the size of Nicholas, whose physique instigated envy as pure as sunlight. The teacher was picked up by her husband unusually right after class so that there was never even an opportunity for Nicholas to speak to her with some excuse in hand. The man’s name was Elmer and he waited outside the classroom looking like a half-god, in summer wearing as little as possible to show off his broad, hairy chest. When Ms Barebones flew from the room, he opened his arms wide, engulfed and led her away instantly, not without pinching her bottom as Nicholas observed on more than one occasion.

Why was it that public school teachers such as this goddess were not also instructed to instruct students, excellent students like him, hungry for knowledge of any sort, in taking the first steps towards becoming men, towards embracing their masculine selves? Nicholas felt that the world, society, state and school were depriving him of a great opportunity.

The other students responded to the charms and attraction of Ms Barebones with hostility. Only Nicholas had the bravado to speak up for her and speak of his adoration for her body, for her flowing movements…and was made fun of in return. And one day, everyone except Nicholas was filing out of class very quickly and the last boy locked the room right in front of Mr Barebones eyes and took it with him, disappearing into the crowd on the corridor. Mr Barebones outside, but Ms Barebones with Nicholas inside.

“Well, what do you know”, Ms Barebones said and sighed. “They locked us in. Rascals.”

Nicholas felt as if legs were jelly. He was still sitting down but if he got up, he surely would simply fall over, perhaps even fall on his teacher and he’d have to hold her thighs or pull her down to him on the floor, the hard stone floor…

“Darling”, they heard Mr Barebones’ muffled voice from outside. “These bastards have locked you in and there’s no key here. I’m going to go and get a spare from reception!”

“You do that, Jim”, she purred, and Nicholas died inside at the sound of her voice, which, in this moment, seemed reserved for him, only for him. The presence of her husband standing outside fuming, was immaterial. She was his! The boys had undoubtedly meant to embarrass him – they’d no idea how much he enjoyed himself despite the pain of feeling like a giant carrot. There was another reason now why he couldnt get up even if he’d wanted to.

“Listen, Nicholas”, she said, “isn’t there another key somewhere here?”

Nicholas knew where the other key was. “I don’t think so, Ms Barebones”, he lied. “But I’m sure your husband will be back in no time.” He sincerely hoped this wouldn’t be the case. Various scenarios flashed through his head, all involving a sudden panic in the school and the necessity for him to rescue Ms Barebones, who’d then end up in his arms outside, holding on to him, whispering ‘oh – Nicholas – dear’ while her husband stood by, helplessly, the older one clearly defeated by a younger, stronger stag.

Ms Barebones interrupted his daydreaming by coming closer and sitting in the chair across. She crossed her long legs and let her skirt ride up freely, obviously feeling relaxed because of the absence of a room full of drooling boys. She felt, Nicholas was glad and also sorry to notice, safe with him. And why not. He was the bookish type with glasses and a sunken chest to which he mostly kept books huddled. He shot glances, he did not look straight at people. Ms Barebones, on the other hand, felt pity with Nicholas. She thought him a nice, calm boy with a good foundation for the study of language if not the application of it. She liked his writing style: it was a little contrived and overheated, but what else could you expect from this age. Ms Barebones, whose first names were Iris and Maria, had sailed through the years of her female awakening with closed eyes and legs firmly pressed together, opening them only at the behest of her now-husband, Elmer Barebones, who had made his wishes known to her most forcefully and without giving her too much choice in the matter. She had, in a way, flowed from her own childhood to her own womanhood without stopping along the way for a good, holy scare, a shake through and through, a shared shake, something you can build on for the rest of your lives…so that, in these minutes with the adoring, and adorable, teenage Nicholas Herbert (yes!) Dart, she was unconsciously breathing some of the heart poison she had avoided half-willingly because she had been just too cute and adorable herself and because Elmer was around at the right time.

Elmer! He didn’t have that first name by accident. Elmer didn’t run to get a key in that moment, he calmly walked and on his way, he flirted with every girl that he saw. He’d reached the age where he was beginning to get unsure about his effect on women, and he’d always bolstered his ego by a victorious, over-effigious attitude towards women. When he found Iris locked in her classroom, some small hidden-away part of his heart, made of a common sort of stone found commonly only on a group of islands near the Scottish coast, jubileed and leapt. Not only did he not go straight to reception, he went out first to light a cigarette, wanting for snow, light snow to cover his tracks. There was no depth in his story so far, but who knew what lay ahead.

Meanwhile, Nicholas was having the chat of his life with Ms Barebones. They sat too close, school was over, appointments were looming, but both held the same piece of fateful string in their hand and were spinning it merrily. Iris, for now she was Iris, sixteen again, was laughing at Nicholas’ silliness and even admiring his cool a little bit: here he was talking to his woman teacher like a young man! And here she was, not running from it (that the door was locked and that she couldn’t run was a minor detail) but letting herself have a little pleasure. Nicholas was spooning her while sitting on his swollen balls. He wasn’t thinking of sex, he was actually having it, having it off with Ms Barebones, and though nothing ever happened after this time, fifteen, twenty minutes tops, he always remembered it as the moment when he’d lost his virginity.

Right now, right here, however, he was still sick as a dog and wondering if he should see a doctor. That would’ve been easy: a doctor from Rumania had her practice right below his flat. He’d met her in the hallway. She was small and shapely, with thick brown hair, large eyes and straight set, bad teeth. Eastern European teeth, the kind you cannot buy but have to be born to have, the kind that these women wear with pride, and no American commercial or product can deter them, because the light reflects on those teeth in a wicked way, or at least that’s how it appeared to men in the West. Nicholas thought this doctor, Ravenna, had her eye on him. She’d offered him vitamin shots, amino acid cocktails, anything homeopathic “to boost your immunity”, she said.

He’d written a short, short story about this woman Ravenna. About her filthy, poor beginnings in the Carpathian mountains, her flight to the West, followed by vampires, because she’d been promised to a vampire prince but preferred to live a true life. She’d become a doctor but, because of her heritage, she was addicted to letting blood. Her blood testing records were legend in London. But it was all in the name of science.

Nicholas put some clothes on, sweat pants, polo shirt, trainers, threw a scarf round his neck to top off the cool that was oozing from his demeanour, and went downstairs. He looked through the glass and saw, out in the road, looking up at his appartement, the old tramp from the park. He shrank back, fled upstairs, followed by that uncanny smell of lavender and unwashed feet, slammed the door, ran into the bedroom, threw himself on the bed and pulled the duvet up over his face. Then he fell almost instantaneously into a deep sleep ridden by nightmares, pursued by merrymaking ghosts.

[...]

There was a river that was flowing along nicely, Nicholas thought, and as the party did not seem to miss him much, he snuck out to take a walk. The air was brisk verging on brutal and he could feel his lungs struggle. He felt more than a little uneasy and not at all like a fish in water. The river did not have any fish it looked like: its shore was full of garbage, a plastic pal, a tortured toothbrush, an orthopedic foot. Nicholas picked the foot up. It looked as if it was a hundred years old. He tried to imagine the person who had worn it: how this man lost his foot of flesh in a boating accident when a fishing boat sprang of its gliding rails and landed on him. Women screamed, dogs barked. When the large dark mass of the boat hit him, the man suddenly stopped caring. He did not cry, he didn’t even feel a massive amount of pain. Something cut him off from his foot the moment it was smashed into a hundred pieces, its ligaments torn, its nails squashed like a limpet. Instead, he felt lighter at once, as if he knew that his life would change, and any change could only be for the better. Yes, he’d be a cripple, unable to run through the fields, hurry along, but he’d done his fair share of running and hurrying. There was a deep tiredness in him, which had sat still for long like a shy animal with strong teeth, too long, had sat out the domestic quarrels and the change of jobs, the change of times and the receding of the fishing business and of his hairline, had waited, impatiently, through the rising of the inner tide almost to the point of drowning the man. He’s a brave one, said the people after the accident. Fathers told their sons to take him as a model: not one tear and no face when the ship came down on his foot. Only the wife of the man whose foot had left him, knew some of what was going on inside him. She left him alone with her worries and trusted, while she was putting extra pennies aside, that he’d continue to take care of them as he always had. The man did not want to shirk his earthly responsibilities. He did not want to die. He merely wanted to take it more slowly, sit around and watch some of the sun and the world go by rather than run along and ahead of it, get up before dawn and to bed after dusk. It was a way of living that he could, had to afford now, which was much more akin to the way of the women. He even began to think of things he had not thought of in a long time, and as his inner animal was slowly stretching to assume its full size, he began to dream in colours again, colours that he’d never even known existed. The foot was buried, as it was custom in the village, in the spot that his family had used as a burial ground since centuries, in the place where he would like next to his wife when his time had come. A cloth tied around his stump, expertly carved like a tree trunk by the local doctor, who took pride and pleasure in taking off limbs artfully, he made his way to the next town with a hospital. He enjoyed meeting an authority on the making of artificial feet and giving his input on questions of balance, weight and tinge of his new foot. When the foot was ready, he had to go to town again, and this time he brought his wife and his two grown-up children along pretending to be helpless (which was one of the new attitudes he indulged in) but really because he wished them to witness his being put together again. The Lord has given me a new life, he used to say, and he could be seen in the church more often now giving thanks to his changed fortune. When he died, a respected man, the undertaker decided that his foot should not be buried with him, because he was impressed by the elegance of this implement, and he put it on a shelf to be reminded of good craftsmanship and the lasting value of man’s works. But the undertaker’s son, who inherited his father’s black business, did not inherit the silent, strong reverie for the new foot and threw it in the garbage, which is how it landed, one day, in the river, only to be found by Nicholas, who threw it back in the water after serenely extracting its secret.