FIFTY-NINE

Hours had passed; it was dark outside. Stephanie could feel her humanity trying to return.

During the previous night, trauma had flattened any sense of who she used to be, and it had only reinforced its grip of numbness after the fresh violence of the morning. But now the part of herself that registered fear and grief and hope was incrementally expanding and trying to remind her of who she was, and how she should respond to the things she experienced. A part of her psyche had run into the road and was screaming before Stephanie’s windshield, flagging her down with crazed hands, trying to slap and claw its way back into her life. But she didn’t want to feel normal again, not yet, because when the end came she would only feel worse.

What she had witnessed after Fergal had crept up the stairs and entered the room had left her feeling sick and physically weak for hours; the violence he had inflicted upon Knacker was a statement and a reminder that she was not like them. Not of them, nor this house.

Fergal had not left to get polyfene. He had pretended to leave to test Knacker because he suspected betrayal. This was a place in which the worst things happened and the worst people flourished. Maybe something had told Fergal as much: a serpent that might be whispering to him again.

It takes one to know one.

And now Stephanie began to shake again, to tremble and to desperately want the relief that could not come, because she was cornered and trapped and chained to a bed and forced to remember. In here, fixed to a metal bedframe and looking at the empty wardrobe, with the mirrored doors smashed out, she was left with nothing meaningful to occupy her mind. And again, in her memory, she could hear Knacker shouting, ‘Leave it out! Leave it! Fergal! Leave it!’

After the first punch had landed on his forehead, Knacker had started that chant as his wits scrambled to get airborne so he could begin blagging his psychopathic mate into another course of action. But Fergal wasn’t having any of it. Fergal enjoyed it. Loved it. Any reason, any excuse; violence made him come alive in a way that nothing else could, not even alcohol or drugs. Stephanie understood this now.

And her memory was misfiring as it had done after Ryan had been kicked to death. Most of what had happened in the room that morning she managed to suppress, save for key images, scenes in Technicolor that stabbed quickly into her thoughts and then repeated their highlights in a slow motion cycle, before vanishing again and returning her to the present, sickened afresh and weak in body.

And then she would hear Knacker’s voice again. How high-pitched it had become, squealing as the younger man, his friend, beat him. And the cycle of reluctant remembrance would begin anew.

Fergal’s neck and face had bloomed bright red, and then shadowed to a purple-black that was too awful to look upon, but too compelling to not see. His expression was all yellow teeth and flared nostrils, slit eyes inside screwed up skin; he’d actually snarled like an animal. Saliva had spat from his mouth like he was a barking dog with a disease. He had been transformed, totally, by rage.

‘It was her! It was her! Tried to get me to grass to the filth!’ But Knacker’s attempt to save himself and transfer the violence onto Stephanie had only incensed Fergal even further. And the blow he’d then wielded into Knacker’s bleached face had made the sound of a coconut thumped by a cricket bat. Skull echoes and jaw judders.

Stephanie was sure Knacker’s neck had snapped or his skull had shattered like a ceramic vase. ‘Fuzzzzz sake, like,’ Knacker had mumbled, and his arms had gone limp as he tried to hold Fergal back, or shove him away; by that point the intentions behind the gesture were as unclear as Knacker’s drunken eyes.

Knacker had then tried to turn around and stagger away from the attack, which only produced the same reaction as petrol thrown onto a garden fire. ‘Don’t you turn your back on me!’ Fergal had roared this over and over again, like he was creating a rhythm for the flurry of bone-deep punches while spraying the air with spit.

Not being able to gain easy access to his friend’s face had simply enraged Fergal to such an extent that he had clutched a handful of Knacker’s hair on the very top of his skull, and pulled his head down so that he could hammer a fist into the smaller man’s face. And even though Stephanie had turned her head away, a sound followed her, a noise similar to a large metal spoon repeatedly striking an open crate of eggs until they were all smashed to liquid.

A part of her she had only known inside the kitchen of the ground floor rooms, feelings she still tried to condemn in retrospect, emotions she believed had no place inside of her, had suddenly surged at that point with a blind and maddening excitement. And only afterwards did she detest herself for the overwhelming presence of this new desire. But at the time of Knacker’s destruction she had wanted to chant ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’ as Fergal punched and punched and punched something that had gone silent on the floor. Then she had thought of Margaret, young, beautiful Margaret, and she had groaned and felt her stomach desperately trying to retch its emptiness into a room that felt small and insubstantial around the frenzy of violence she was convinced had created another dead body at 82 Edgehill Road.

But even the punching and the kicking that smashed Knacker’s body half under the bed, where he choked for air through the blood that was inside his broken mouth, was not sufficient punishment or satiation for Fergal’s rage. Because he then pulled Knacker out from under the bed by his curly hair, dragged him like a child across the floor, raised him from the ground and pitched his floppy body into the mirrored doors of the wardrobe.

Only the silvery crash following the explosion of a human body through two broad glass doors snapped Fergal out of his violent trance. And for a while he seemed disorientated, and just stood still, sniffing and looking at the cut knuckles on one hand. Eventually he gazed at Knacker and nonchalantly said, ‘Cunt.’

Holding one arm stiffly, supporting the wrist with his other hand, Fergal wandered out of the room, sniffing as he went.

And his exit broke Stephanie from her torpor and she scrabbled as far as the remit of her chain would allow, to locate, seize and retrieve a long sliver of mirrored glass from the carpet, before returning to her former position at the foot of the bed.

She slipped the piece of broken glass behind her bottom and beneath the bed. And then sat back against the mattress, panting and almost weeping with relief that the violence had stopped.

Incredibly, and impossibly, Knacker wasn’t dead. Though he didn’t move from where he was positioned half inside the wardrobe cavity, he had coughed and muttered something to himself before falling silent again.

Fergal had come back into the room grinning, one hand wrapped in sodden toilet paper. He’d smiled sheepishly at Stephanie as if nothing significant had occurred in the room, said, ‘Oh dear.’ This was followed by the deep, forced ‘Ho Ho Ho’ imitation of a laugh. ‘Fink he’s gonna have headache. What you fink? He he he.’ He prodded Knacker’s still and silent form with the toe of a dirty training shoe. ‘You’s been asking for a shoeing, Knacker, longer than I can honestly remember.’

The next laugh that came more readily sounded devious. He followed the laughter by spitting a long slug of phlegm and saliva onto Knacker’s back, before he dragged his mate by one leg across the broken glass and into the corridor outside.

Fergal only returned to the room to side-foot the larger pieces of broken glass to the foot of the wardrobe and away from Stephanie. And as he kicked the glass she’d shrunk at the thought of him searching under the bed and finding the shard she had retrieved.

He’ll kick you to death where you sit.

But Fergal never came near the bed. And before he left the room he grinned at her. ‘Oh, do you know if that shop by the pub sells polyfene? Afraid you is going up the garden behind that tree wiv your boyfriend. You can keep him company.’