Jonathan Lyon - Carnivore - The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017

JONATHAN LYONwas born in 1991 in London. He studied at Oxford University, graduating in 2013. He moved to Berlin the same year where he now works as a musician and writer. He has had a chronic illness for over a decade. Carnivore is his debut novel.

For anyone who’s been ill too long.

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About the Author JONATHAN LYON was born in 1991 in London. He studied at Oxford University, graduating in 2013. He moved to Berlin the same year where he now works as a musician and writer. He has had a chronic illness for over a decade. Carnivore is his debut novel.

Title Page

Dedication For anyone who’s been ill too long.

ACT 1: The ordinary world ACT 1 The ordinary world

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 2: The call to adventure

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 3: Crossing the border

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 4: The resurrection

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 5: The return

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Acknowledgements

Copyright

ACT 1

The ordinary world

‘What’s your fantasy?’

All sex and storytelling starts with this, of course. Sometimes the question’s self-directed, sometimes it’s only implied. But here, obviously, I was supposed to reply ‘being dominated,’ so that’s what I said.

I was actually fantasising about eating a satsuma, slowly, slice by slice, on the edge of a rooftop, or perhaps on a hilltop, watching a building below me burn in a fire I’d started. But this would be too long to say aloud, and probably wouldn’t arouse a man in the prime of his mid-life crisis as easily as a boy begging for a beating.

So now that my victim thought that I was his victim, he could breathe more heavily, and began struggling to unbutton his shirt.

‘No, no you should be doing this,’ he said, fluttering his fingers. ‘I mean, undress me, boy!’

Unsuited to the dominant role, he recoiled at his own orders. Clearly, he was a submissive – if I’d had the energy, I could’ve had him on all fours in a few minutes. But energy is not one of my vices.

‘Of course, sir,’ I said instead, my mouth twitching into a smile I had to hide by lowering my head.

Beneath his shirt was a paunch of greying hairs. As I removed the rest of his clothes, he hovered awkwardly between sitting and standing, his hands just above my back, not yet confident enough to touch me.

‘Now, now… you!’

I took off my tracksuit – the uniform he’d requested – delivered my finest doe-eyed simper, and knelt down. But he rejected this arrangement and instead dragged me upwards onto the bed.

‘No time for that… boy. Let’s get to the point.’

He forced my face into the pillow and I began to moan in a way that would make him hard. Perhaps he hoped I’d feel a kind of shame in this, but ‘this’ meant nothing.

‘This’ was merely boring, but it was worth a thousand pounds. And he wouldn’t last long. I was simply a blank page onto which he could write his desires. And what banal desires! There was no ambition in them, no real yearning, not even any real sadness. His mind was shut to himself – all he was semi-aware of were a few anxieties, a few humiliations, a few petulant disappointments. Perhaps he fancied himself a deviant for fucking a boy he believed to be nineteen while his wife wandered somewhere around the Mediterranean. But he was ordinary. To a true deviant, sex is much too straightforward.

I was aroused by making him think that I was afraid of him – extracting his desires like a vampire of fantasy, while giving him only falsehood in return.

My fiction was of the orphan desperate for money, slightly stupid, pleasingly unsophisticated beside the powerful newspaper-owner. I made him feel like his life – on the fifteenth floor of some glass and steel erection in central London – was beyond my understanding, and therefore more meaningful than it was.

He finished in about ten minutes. As he got off me, I assumed he was leaving for the bathroom – so I’d begun turning over, when he struck me with his belt. My body spasmed in delight – here, at least, at last, was a little more excitement, even if there was still no creativity in his lust. The pain made me laugh, but I hid it with a howl.

‘No, no, please,’ I begged, rolling my eyes at myself.

I could act more convincingly than this, but he wouldn’t want me to. Part of my charm was my innocence. I needed to seem out of my depth, ineptly play-acting at being a seasoned sexual plaything. He needed me to be a bad actor, so he could see through to the lost boy behind the performance.

Of course, the lost boy was the performance, and the bad acting was excellent acting. His metal buckle bit into my flesh with an eroticism his body could never have communicated. With each hit, a hunger in my muscles was being satisfied. And soon, my trembling was not an act – I was aroused. My senses began to mix: a blue the colour of a kingfisher’s back blurred the edges of my vision, and in my gums I tasted the squeezed juice of a lime.

He whipped me twenty or so times, until my pleading reached a satisfactory intensity, and he threw aside the belt – and left. As soon as he was in the bathroom, I sat up, rubbing my eyes so it would look like I’d been crying. Outside, October was white. I walked to the balcony and slid open its door.

Yesterday, I’d posed as an undergraduate for a calmer client – and quoted Nietzsche’s desire for music ‘to be as cheerful and profound as an October afternoon’. That had meant little then – but, following this violence, perhaps it could mean more to me. Nietzsche’s philosophy had, after all, come out of chronic illness – and so maybe mine could too. I’d call for a different music, though, since my illness was dominated by pain – a constant, meaningless, incurable pain at the core of my muscles, that weakened me into a fog without memories or focus – a pain that confined me to a parallel word, the world of the sick – where being whipped until my blood spilled out seemed like pleasure, or even like music.

So perhaps this October afternoon was cheerful and profound. Though now its music was the sound of a man washing off his semen in a hotel shower, transitioning from delight to shame at how he’d got there. The sky had a clarity that I could almost forget my body in – to be purely mind, racing into a new weather. But I had to put on my clothes before he returned, and resume the posture of a wounded adolescent – to maximise his regret, and so increase my price.

With my phone I photographed the credit cards and driving license in his wallet. He should have kicked me out before he showered, but his embarrassment had made him careless.

When he did return, he paid me £1,500 in £50 notes. My posture combined fear with gratitude. He couldn’t look me in the eye. I left him slumped on a chair in a towel, drained of his pedestrian ecstasy, shocked by himself and what he imagined I’d suffered.

The door closed slowly as I left along the corridor. By the time I’d got to the lift, I’d forgotten his face.