Nicola Griffith - Stay

She bullied, she panicked, she wheedled, and one step at a time I crept closer to the trailer, and after about five days I was there, swaying in front of the three metal steps.

“Fuck,” she said.

“I can do it,” I said, because she sounded near to tears.

“Yeah, right. Look, you sit on the edge of this step—”

“No.”

“Jesus, Aud, you have—”

“Won’t get up again.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, how about if you lean here for a minute—can you do that?—and I’ll get inside first and try to drag you up the steps from behind.”

“Move the steps.”

“Move …? Right.” It took her a couple of shoves because she had to keep one arm around my waist, but they folded away underneath the rig eventually. She squeezed past me, climbed into the rig, and maneuvered me until my bottom rested against the cold sill. Then she squatted, put her arms under mine, and clasped them beneath my breasts.

“Now, when I say, you push off with your good leg and I’ll pull. You can do this, okay? Ready? On three. One, two, three!”

I hopped and she hauled and we shot backwards into the trailer alongside the recliners, heads pointing at her bed, me lying on top, faceup, her hands on my breasts. She levered me away from her and scrambled up. I just lay there, looking up at her upside-down face.

“My bed’s closest. You’re almost done.”

A confusion of trying to stand, pushing and being pulled, prodded, shouted at, until I found myself lying on her pullout and she was sitting next to me, water steaming in a bowl by her side. Where had that come from?

“Your throat’s stopped bleeding. I wrapped it. It was already crusting up.” I touched what felt like a towel around my neck. “Don’t mess with it. You’ve lost enough blood. And you’ve got a scrape across your forehead and nose that I still have to clean. I already did your feet.” They were wrapped bulkily in white bandage. When did she do that? “Full of dirt, but you didn’t seem to feel me scrubbing away.” She lifted the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “This’ll sting. Might have been better if you’d stayed passed out—”

Peroxide. Bleach. Pierced people with bleached hair and writhing tattoos. At night Tompkins Square Park was full of them. They hung out by the fountain that has been dry for years, on the side opposite the gay boys with their squat, muscular little dogs wearing bandannas. I didn’t want those dogs getting a scent of blood-drenched clothes.

I stepped off the path. It felt wrong walking on grass in Karp’s shoes. Light and sound faded until there was nothing but my breath and the rustle of plastic bags. I stopped, listened. Silence. And under the scent of green growing things, the smell of urine-stained clothes and unwashed hair.

I dumped one bag—the underwear, the shoes, the jacket—behind a tree. Someone would find it within half an hour, someone who wasn’t particular about bloodstains, and who wouldn’t talk to the police. I walked on a little.

The park bench was made of concrete, still almost whole, and in the dark you couldn’t see the graffiti. I went down on one knee to shove the second bag—the trousers and tunic—beneath it and was about to stand when the razor touched my throat.

“My bench, bitch. What you doing to my bench?”

The concrete smelled of mold and cold stone. My knee, to which I had transferred all my weight as I was about to get up, hurt. The arm around my throat, the one holding the straight razor, was thin and scabbed.

“Gonna cut you good.” A young voice, very young.

With a straight razor held firmly against your carotid, there’s very little you can do. If you kick out backwards, the person holding it goes backwards, dragging their arm and the blade with it. You wouldn’t feel much but you’d be unconscious in thirty seconds and dead in two minutes. If you turn to your left, it pulls across your trachea. You wouldn’t bleed too much, but you’d be getting no oxygen. Turn to the right and the blade slices into your jugular as well as the carotid. Move downward and it takes the artery where it eases past your jawbone. Try to pull the blade down and it opens the blood vessels where they dive under the collarbone.

Neither of us moved. I couldn’t think of a single thing to do or say that would save my life.

“What you say, bitch? Fucking with my bench.”

This is how it would end, then, killed by a barely teenage junkie in a squalid little park in a city I hated.

The arm under my chin tightened. A thin trickle of blood ran down the neck of my borrowed shirt. Dying in someone else’s clothes, with a pornographic tape in my pocket, dying as the kind of person who could disassemble a man with her bare hands for no particular reason and who hadn’t even thought to check whether he was still alive.

“You think I’m shitting you? You think I won’t do it?”

What did it matter? “Actually, I’m thinking of an afternoon a year or two ago, in my garden in Atlanta.” I closed my eyes, remembering. “It was sunny and warm. I have a lot of trees: oak and pecan and beech—”

The arm jerked. “Shut up.” This time the blood flowed smoothly, no little trickle.

“—and jays, a lot of blue jays. Noisy birds. But smart. They band together when there’s danger. So one day I was outside—”

“Shut the fuck up!” The hand was trembling.

“—and these jays were all screeching around the big oak tree, then diving at it. There’s this peregrine falcon perched on the end of a branch, about twenty feet up. It’s ignoring the jays and watching this hole halfway up the trunk of the beech tree where chickadees liked to nest. Then I noticed that all the little birds, the finches and sparrows and tits, had gone.”

The trembling against my throat grew worse and the razor shifted slightly as the wielder moved restlessly. In my peripheral vision I saw red sneakers. Small red sneakers. Razorboy was wired, needing a hit so badly that probably none of my words made sense. But the story wasn’t for him.

“The falcon was so sure there was nothing in the garden to hurt it that it didn’t see what I saw. A cat, skinning up the trunk of that oak, quiet as a snake. The jays were screeching even more: now there were two predators on their turf. The cat inched belly down along the branch until it was about three feet away. Its tail lashed back and forth, and it gathered its back feet, but just as it jumped, the hawk dived. It nearly hit the ground but just managed to swoop back up. It was so—”

The arm spasmed and the razor jerked, hard, and one of the red sneakers kicked out involuntarily, and the razor fell and clattered cheaply against the concrete bench. I stared at it. Blinked. Stood up.

He, or perhaps it was a she, it was too dark and he was too thin and too young for me to be sure, backed up a step. I picked up the razor, hefted it, looked at his oversize turtleneck and flapping khakis. He was shaking so badly he wouldn’t get more than two steps before I’d be on him. He knew that, too.

I moved the razor back and forth, thinking, and took a step towards him. “—the hawk was so flustered the jays managed to drive it off. But do you know what the best part was? The cat. It was a long branch that the hawk had been on, and where the cat was now it was so narrow that it couldn’t turn around. It was stuck. And that’s when all the little birds, the finches and sparrows and tits, came out to play. They flew to the twigs and branches nearby and sang at the cat, and flicked their tails at it. The cat couldn’t do a thing. Take off your sweater.”

He was so far gone, arms and legs jerking so badly, that it took him almost a minute to get it over his head.

“Throw it to me.” He tried, but it dropped at his feet. I advanced. He backed away. I bent, picked it up. Black, thick, filthy. “There are clothes in the bag under the bench.” I lifted the razor and took another step towards him. He watched, dead-eyed. I folded the blade.