Franklin puts the last piece of tape in place and then he stands there for a while, as if admiring his handiwork.
‘What? What are you going to do?’ Parker demands. But he knows his sounds carry no meaning to Franklin’s ears.
He waits for the moment. For Franklin to reach behind himself again and bring out the scissors or the hacksaw.
But then Franklin suddenly turns and walks away, out of the room. Parker is confused, his mind full of questions. Where has he gone? What is he up to? Am I safe? Is this just another game?
It is not long before he gets his answers. Franklin returns to the bedroom, this time carrying something. It looks like a roll of thick grey cotton.
Franklin sits on the bed again. He places the roll on his lap. He unties the ribbons holding it together, then begins to unroll it ceremoniously. Parker cannot take his eyes off it.
And then he sees what it holds.
The material contains numerous pockets. And jutting out from each pocket is a metallic implement. There are scalpels here. Saws. Sharp-pointed picks. All manner of devices for slicing and stabbing and poking and probing.
Parker looks across the rapid rise and fall of his bare chest. He can feel his heart pounding furiously inside its cage, as if desperate to escape. His eyes feel ready to burst out of their sockets. Air is being sucked in and expelled out of his nostrils at an alarming rate.
Franklin selects one of the instruments as though choosing his favourite chocolate from a Christmas tin. He holds it up in admiration. It’s one of the scalpels, its blade looking sharp enough to cut the very air around it.
Parker thrashes on the bed. He tries again to cry out, to make himself heard and understood, if only by his captor. He needs help from somebody – anybody. Maybe even from God, if he can be so merciful.
But he knows how this will go, how his fate is sealed, and already his tears are flowing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Franklin says. ‘I’m sure this will do the trick.’
* * *
When it’s over, when the deed is done and he’s showering off the copious amounts of blood and he’s staring at the pink-tinged water swirling down the drain, Franklin cannot prevent his mind drifting back to those final images of his mother, lying there in that bath, appearing so at peace, her arms bobbing on the surface of the water, showing him her open wounds.
He remembers looking around the bathroom in puzzlement, trying to find the implement she had used to slice open her wrists. After a minute or two of this, he pulled back his sleeves and reached into the water. It was cold, and his mother’s flesh felt unreal – like that of an uncooked chicken. He moved his hands along the bottom of the bath, sliding them beneath his mother’s corpse.
He experienced a sudden, sharp pain, and when he yanked his hand out with a yelp, he saw that one of his fingers was now pouring blood that ran across his palm and dripped to the water below, splashing and turning to crimson curls that mingled with the blood of his mother.
He put his hand back into the bath, more carefully this time, and then he took hold of what he had found and brought it out.
It was a scalpel. He had never seen such a tool before. Its metal shaft was so slender, its replaceable blade so honed, its point so fine. A thing of beauty. He had no idea how his mother had obtained it or where she had kept it in the house, but he decided there and then that it was part of his inheritance. He would keep it.
He knew that when others came, they too would want to know what his mother had used, and so he went to the kitchen and found a sharp paring knife that he dropped into the bath.
After he had hidden the scalpel in his bedroom, he made another trip to the kitchen, where he prepared jam on toast. He knew he wasn’t supposed to take food without permission, and every few seconds he would turn towards the door, checking that his mother wasn’t standing there, dripping and naked and filled with fury.
He carried the toast and a glass of milk into the living room. A film was just starting – something suitable for an early morning audience. Love Story, starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. Only when he had watched the whole thing did he pick up the phone and dial the emergency services.
Franklin has viewed that film many times since then. It’s one of his favourites. He much prefers films from earlier decades, before it became fashionable to include so much sex and bad language. He often wonders why modern so-called romance movies can’t focus more on the romance element.
One of the things he likes about Love Story is the strength of the love between the main couple. Nobody can split them apart – not even the guy’s father when he cuts off all financial support for his son. That’s a real couple. Franklin thinks he wouldn’t have to do what he does if couples could stay together through thick and thin like that.
Another thing he likes about the film – and he thinks about this a lot – is one of its famous lines:
Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Franklin has never quite worked that one out, but it has always stayed with him. Does it mean that two people in love should never apologise for anything, no matter what they do? Or does it mean that if you’re truly in love then you would never intentionally do anything bad in the first place? Or does it mean that if you’re in a loving relationship you should always know what the other person is thinking, and therefore apologising is redundant? Or is there another interpretation he hasn’t quite grasped?
Whatever, he likes it. He’s not great on feelings, but that phrase feels profound and true.
Which is why, when he was cutting away upstairs with the scalpel he took from his dead mother, it never crossed his mind to say he was sorry. It was all done in the name of love, and sometimes that requires human suffering. It requires blood and tears and pain.
Love deserves sacrifice.
Franklin thinks that’s a line that could be used in a film.
32
Victim of Love
– Erasure
Webley hasn’t slept.
At least, she doesn’t think she has. Not properly. Maybe nodded off briefly once or twice, but no sweet dreams.
She kept thinking she could hear things. Some of them were undoubtedly real, like that stupid cat that decided it wanted to announce its presence with plaintive cries before furiously digging up the gravelled area in front of her house. In the end, Webley opened the lower window and hissed at it to piss off. The cat just stared at her while it squatted, then it scraped at the gravel once more before casually sauntering off, its tail upright in what Webley assumed was the feline equivalent of showing her the middle finger. She has never liked cats.
Some of the noises were, she decided, manufactured by her imagination. She heard footsteps outside her house, inside her house, and even in this very room. She was jolted into alert mode by doors creaking open, the shatter of glass, scratching at her window. On each and every occasion she abandoned the warmth of her duvet to investigate, and each time she found nothing untoward. She had to command herself to stop being so jittery. Didn’t stop her regularly peeking between the curtains to check for the bogeyman.
She blames Cody.
He was the one who turned Parker into some kind of demonic night prowler in her head. Before he dropped that particular grenade in her thoughts, Parker was the man she wanted to help, not defend herself against.
