Anne Billson - Suckers

I was still jumpy. I thought I glimpsed the Cortina again, but a long way behind us, so I made Duncan take a roundabout route into Fulham — all around the back roads and over Hammersmith Bridge. We buried Bag Number Six beneath some bushes in a small churchyard. As we scrabbled in the dirt with our makeshift spades (me one-handed with an empty yogurt carton, Duncan with a piece of broken slate), an east wind blew up and riffled the tops of some nearby poplars. I thought I saw the bag move as it lay in the hole we had made, waiting to be covered with dirt, but by now I was desperate for sleep and there was a slight rippling at the edges of my vision.

In Shepherd's Bush, while we were stopped at a red light, I stumbled out of the car and stuffed Bags Number Seven and Eight into some cartons of rubbish awaiting collection outside an Indian restaurant. Bag Number Nine went behind a pile of rubble on a small patch of wasteland in White City; by that stage we were too tired even to dig a hole. Relief washed over me as we drove away. Grauman would have his work cut out. He would be too busy to think about having us tortured and mutilated. And he'd be wet.

Violet was history. Not even her Hatman could put her back together again now.

Neither of us wanted to go back to Duncan's that night. And, although I knew he hadn't been keeping count, I had no intention of letting him spend the rest of that night with me. I wanted to get home with Bag Number Ten before he found out it was still in my possession.

I tapped him for cash, left him on the sofa at Matt's place, and staggered to the nearest mini-cab office. In the car, on the way, I dozed off. At Camden Town, the driver woke me, and leered suggestively, and said I looked as though I'd enjoyed the party, and maybe I'd like to go to another one. Then he saw the bloodstained teatowel and asked if I'd hurt my hand. I said yes, I'd hurt it punching a mini-cab driver in the face.

I let myself info my room and collapsed into bed. My hand was still throbbing, but I gulped down a couple of Valium and slept for nine solid hours. There were nightmares, strange shadows which moved through the deepest parts of the forest, but by the time I woke up, the details had faded. I made myself a cup of tea, and then I spread an old newspaper over my bed and opened Bag Number Ten. For a long time, I gazed at the wizened, waxy object which looked like something you might find suspended from a hook in the window of a Chinese restaurant. The crimson nail varnish was chipped and messy, though not as messy as the scraps of muscle and ligament at the wrist. I peeled the teatowel away from my own left hand and compared them. Mine was bigger, but I thought it every bit as elegant as Violet's. My nails were better shaped, even though at that moment they were caked with blood and dirt. A good bath and an even better buffing would see them right. But there wasn't much I could do about the little finger. That really spoiled things.

Later that day, I dropped into the out-patient department of my local hospital. I told them I'd been chopping paper the night before, and had caught my finger in the guillotine. They ticked me off for not having rushed to them immediately with the missing joint — they could have sewn that back on, they said — but they cleaned up the gooey mess that was left, gave me some antibiotics to clear the infection that had set in, and dressed it without asking too many awkward questions about why the guillotine had left me with a chewed-up stump instead of a nice clean slice.

For the next few days, I carried Matt's Teddy boy flick-knife around with me, just in case. I did a lot of looking over my shoulder, but after a while I started to believe we really had got away with it. We really had rubbed her out. Grauman didn't come after us, though I dreamt once or twice that he did. I phoned his hotel and was told he had checked out. He hadn't left a forwarding address, the receptionist said, but she remembered him ordering a taxi to Heathrow. She remembered his departure because there had been a lot of luggage, and he'd been in an enormous hurry, but he'd been generous with his tips.

I went into college and acted as if nothing had happened, though Ruth kept giving me funny looks, and once or twice provided me with free drugs and hinted I could confide in her any time I wanted. I didn't want, of course. She was curious about the big dressing on my little finger, and even more curious when at last it was taken off and she saw the joint was missing. I told her I had shut it in a car door, and she seemed to accept that, although on several occasions afterwards I caught her staring at the stump with a sort of thrilled fascination.

Meanwhile, I kept Violet's hand wrapped up in my room. On the first day, I sketched it. On the second day, I was drawing it again when I thought I saw the fingers move. On the third day, I came home and found the bag empty. After a nervous search, I finally found it clinging to the back of the curtains, fingers gripping the fabric so tightly the knuckles had gone shiny with tension. I prised it loose, wrapped it in a dozen layers of polythene, and put it in an old biscuit tin, sealing the lid with Sellotape, masking tape, electrical tape, and any other tape I could find. That night I lay on my bed, trying to sleep but unable to do anything but lie in the darkness, listening to the muted metallic tunka-tunk of soft but persistent rapping from the inside of the tin.

My nerve cracked. I couldn't live with this thing any longer. The next day, I took it into college and late in the afternoon, when all but the most dedicated students had abandoned their easels, went up to the deserted etching department — setting of that first historic glimpse of my late rival and consequently, I thought, an appropriate place in which to dispose of her last remnants. I opened the tin and found the hand nestling on a cushion of shredded polythene. For ten minutes I sat and stared at it, but it didn't move a muscle. I began to wonder if I'd ever seen it moving in the first place; perhaps I was hallucinating after all the sleepless nights. But I wasn't going to take any chances. I didn't fancy waking up to find those fingernails doing to my face what they'd done to the polythene.

Carefully, with tongs, I lowered it into the etching bath. I'd always wanted to see what hydrochloric acid would do to human flesh. Inhuman flesh was the next best thing, but the immediate effect was disappointing — not, as I'd imagined, like a shoal of piranhas latching on to a chunk of meat. There was no thrashing at all. It was nothing more than a lump of dead matter covered in tiny bubbles. But, after an hour or so, I saw that the outline was less distinct, that the bubbles were eating into it. I didn't dare go home and leave it, so I turned the lights off and lay low until the night watchman had done his rounds.

It took most of the night. By first light, the flesh had dissolved, but the bones were still resisting. I dried them off, wrapped them in a shoebox, and mailed them to the Smithsonian Institute. I didn't bother marking the parcel with a return address.

As for Duncan and me, things didn't exactly turn out the way I'd planned. He seemed fine for a couple of days — friendly enough, though neither of us made any reference to what had happened, and he avoided catching my eye. But after that he did a U-turn and started sinking. He'd been off college a lot after meeting Violet, but now he stopped attending altogether. A rumour began to circulate that he'd either dropped out of — or been dropped from — the course. I tried to reach him on the phone once or twice. When I hadn't seen him in a fortnight, I had a bad feeling and went round to the flat. He was there, and he let me in, but I could tell he was on a downward spiral. There was nothing I could do about it; I was feeling rather peculiar myself, and I didn't want him dragging me down. I wasn't even sure I fancied him any more, not when he was like this. It wasn't the discoloured teeth that put me off, nor the scraggy beard he'd sprouted because he could no longer be bothered to shave. It was the smile I didn't like. It was the smile of someone who had lost his grip.