Simon Lelic - A Thousand Cuts

No. It was a common enough surname. It might not be him. She did not know for certain that it would be him. Not for certain.

They turned into a side street. The driver cancelled the siren but left the lights flashing. A car moved as though to pull out from the kerb in front of them and the policeman at the wheel of the squad car hammered the horn and swerved though he did not really need to. Lucia turned her head as they passed. She saw a woman’s face, her expression teetering between shock and fury. The policeman up front switched the siren back on.

They arrived. They were the first. The car stopped and the siren stopped but Lucia heard its echo. An ambulance, four blocks away perhaps. She got out. The uniforms followed, placing their caps on their heads and trailing Lucia up the path.

The front door was ajar. Lucia rang the bell, knocked, rang the bell again. Without waiting for a reply, she pushed the door wide.

‘Mr Samson?’

Immediately she heard sobbing. A woman, upstairs.

‘Mrs Samson?’ Lucia spoke louder, almost shouting. She said her name. She said, ‘It’s the police, Mrs Samson. The ambulance is right behind us.’ She led the way towards the staircase.

She did not recognise anything and though she could not have expected to, this gave her hope. In the hallway was a coat rack straining with coats and just about clinging to the wall. There were shoes, some placed neatly in a line along the skirting board, others discarded with their laces still tied. There was a child’s bike, too small for him, she thought, almost certainly too small for him. They passed the living room and Lucia saw remnants on the coffee table of a breakfast interrupted: toast buttered but naked of jam, juice half drunk from glasses perspiring in the heat. The weather girl on the television grinned and caught Lucia’s eye but Lucia’s gaze did not settle. She looked for bookcases. In his house she expected bookcases. There were none in the living room and this was a relief, until she saw a set of shelves in the hallway beyond the stairs and another just inside the kitchen door.

She climbed the stairs quickly. Her feet scuffed against the wooden steps but the sound was soon masked by the stomping boots of the uniforms behind her, the crackle of their radios, their open-mouthed breathing at her ear. At the top Lucia hesitated and she sensed the men behind her collide. The sobbing had stopped. The door ahead of her was shut and there was no obvious movement further along the landing. She called aloud once more.

‘Here. In here.’

A man’s voice: quiet, defeated. It was a voice Lucia recognised. She hurried on, tensing her stomach to catch her falling heart.

She reached the doorway to the bedroom. The door was open, obscuring the main portion of the room. Ahead of her, slumped against a wardrobe, was Elliot’s father. His head was bowed. His hands were crimson.

Lucia stepped inside. She watched Elliot’s father as she moved. She knew she should turn her head, refocus her eyes but her body no longer felt under her control. Even her feet seemed to be carrying her against her will. She knew what was waiting inside and she did not want to see it. She wanted to back away, to turn, to leave the house. She wanted to rewind and tell Cole, give it to Charlie, give it to Walter even, because then at least she would not have to see it. But the uniforms crowded behind her and her feet kept moving and before she could resist she was in the room.

Elliot’s mother was cradling her son’s body. The blood was everywhere: in black puddles on the sand-coloured carpet, in Elliot’s hair, on his mother’s face and up her arms, on the bed sheets that were still entangled around Elliot’s legs, soaking through the strips of linen that were wrapped and knotted about Elliot’s wrists. With the blood, the colour had left Elliot’s skin. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted backwards and the fingers of his left hand were crumpled against the floor. Beneath the hair that covered her face, Elliot’s mother was sobbing still but silently. Her shoulders trembled. Her hands shook. She clung to her son as though willing the warmth of her body to diffuse into his.

Lucia took another step and reached with a hand and all of a sudden she was on her knees, the carpet damp and cold through the fabric of her trousers. She reached again but her hand hovered in the air and fell away. She looked behind her, up at her colleagues. They were staring at the boy. It was all they could do. It was the most that any one of them could do.

Someone told you about that, did they?

Who?

Whoever. Doesn’t matter to me.

What did they say?

Whatever. They can say what they like. And anyway I’m glad. I’m glad we did it. I’d do it again if I could. I’d do it even better. I wouldn’t get in trouble for it neither. They’d be thanking me. They’d be cheering me. They’d be saying I did em all a favour.

Why do you wanna know?

Why, what does it matter?

Am I gonna get paid for this?

So why should I?

Fuck you. Arrest me for what?

Obstructing. What the fuck am I obstructing? You’re the one obstructing me. And anyway, you can’t arrest me. I’m too young. You can’t do anything to me.

Do me a favour. They only send you to them places if you’ve killed someone, shagged some tart and she’s called it rape. You might get em to give me an asbo but I’ve always sort of fancied one of them.

Fuck it though. I’ll tell you. Doesn’t matter now, does it? Like I say, you should be thanking me. The teachers, the parents, your lot: you should be thanking me.

We knew he was a freak from the start, me and Don. It was obvious. You just had to look at him. His beard. I mean, fuck. What was he thinking? Did he look in the mirror in the morning and think, yep, that’s the look I’m going for: I want my face to look like an arse. The ladies’ll just love it. And his clothes. I never knew it was possible to wear so much brown. His jacket was brown, his shirt was brown, his trousers were brown, his socks were brown. He had brown shoes and brown pants probably, ha, yeah, brown pants. But that’s another story innit?

He was an immigrant. That’s what he told us. He wasn’t ashamed of it neither. He was boasting about it, making out he was better than the rest of us. Teachers aren’t supposed to do that, are they? They’re not supposed to insult you. Like when I told him my name. He asked me and I told him and he didn’t believe me. Said I was a liar. Called me one to my face. Threatened to hit me. Teachers aren’t supposed to do that either. Or maybe he said he’d touch me, which when you think about it is even worse. So he was threatening us and insulting us and acting like he was some kind of big shot even though he wasn’t no older than a sixth-former.

Do you know what he did? This is funny. His first class, right, and guess what he does. He runs out blubbing. Can you believe it? Although you’re a bird so you probably cry all the time. Like my sister, she’s always fucking snivelling, saying Gi did this, Gi did that, blah blah blah, blah blah blah.

All right all right. Don’t get your tits in a twist. I was coming to that, wasn’t I?

The football match.

This is much later though. We did loads of good stuff to him before then. Like the turd, that was funny, and the Guy Fawkes we made of him and set alight on the hockey pitch. And this one time we bought these eggs, right, and pierced em so they’d go off. Then we—

All right, whatever. Your loss. You’ll never know now, will you?

The football match. We have this match, right? Once a year. Just before Christmas usually but this time it was afterwards, cos of all the snow and that. It’s teachers against the first team. It’s Terence’s thing, he organises it. Terence. Most people call him TJ. Or Twat Jam. We just call him Terence cos it’s Terence he hates the most. So it’s Terence’s thing, he loves it. You should of seen him when Bickle made him put it on hold. It was like he’d been promised an Action Man for Christmas but got given Fag Hag Barbie instead.