Sam Thompson - Communion Town

Fischer is carrying out his inspection, now checking the overhead rails, the conveyor belts, the hooks, the chutes and the basins, now seeing that tools have been sterilised, drains cleared and work tables hosed down. It’s the same at the end of each shift. If he finds something out of order then heaven help the culprit. Any moment now he’ll see that one of the tools is unaccounted for. I watch for it. I’ve waited here, out of sight, watching, not moving: but now it’s time to move.

Hello, Fischer. Here I am, dressed for work, carrying the implement of my trade. The last of the others has gone, you see. I thought in this moment I’d find some words to say to you, to settle what’s happened between us in these weeks. But look, we’re here and I have no words to add. In my head it was easier. You must be pleased the things you’ve done to me have worked so well.

The flesh of his face looks heavy under the lights. As I stump towards him his lips twitch and he tilts his head a few degrees, letting me know that what’s happening is well within his expectations. He’s quite sure he has the upper hand. He tugs each fingertip in turn and draws off his gloves, then lays one on the other and bats them against his thigh. He’ll take his time and decide what to do with me.

We all know Fischer’s floor is run to the hardest standards. No second chances: you let him down and you’re finished. He smiles that lazy, dangerous smile as the distance between us closes. But he fails to understand that I do not make mistakes here on the floor. I’m good at my job.

Now we’re within arm’s reach, I can see where the hairs are thinning on top of his head and how his pate glistens under the lights. There’s a mark where the hard hat has been clamped into the skin. He looks up at me and his mouth shows the rough line of his teeth. He thinks I’m slow, but that’s only because I never know how to answer him.

Puzzlement shows in his expression. Odd that so small a delay, just long enough for me to walk across a sloping cement floor, can add up to the error he now suspects. He should have acted differently, but now it’s too late. His eyes are the colour of dry concrete. The pupils contract to pinpricks as they note the implement in my hand. I’ve sharpened it according to good working practices. All the others are hanging in the racks across the floor. I wonder what I’ll do next, but the action I’m taking is all in one piece, impossible to dismantle. A sharp edge with a sharp point, that’s the tool of the trade.

With my glove I cover his face, gripping hard with my fingertips on temples and orbits, forcing his chin up and his head back in a subduing hold no different from the hold I use a thousand times and more in every shift I work. With the edge at his throat, he comes to attention.

Wait now.

My hand is moving, but wait. Stop. Riffle backwards through nights and days, the glare of the abattoir and the dark of dawn in Glory Part. Find me, walking alone in a small hour of the morning, in the Market where I saw what I saw. I wish it wasn’t so. The hand is moving, I can’t take it back, but I need to explain. This is my account, slipped in before the stroke of the knife.

If I had taken another way back to my lodgings that sole time, all the rest would have been different. But my habit never varied. Each morning I walked home ahead of first light. I left the meatpacking district by the back streets, passing the canal, the dockland warehouses and the garment factories, then cutting down the length of the Strangers’ Market. I liked that time of the day, the maritime atmosphere that filled the district for an hour and the sense of depletion before sleep. The air opened, the dew fell, and the decaying industrial hindquarter of the city showed another side: you saw that, beneath the wear and the work, it was pretty. The silhouettes of the chimneys and derricks were one shade darker than the sky.

Bread was baking, and I could hear birds in a strip of parkland two streets away. Work fell further behind as I walked. Weariness trickled through my limbs to settle in my hands and feet. A din of dying nightlife rose from the city centre, far away across the river, but around here the night was bleeding out undisturbed.

A gust of stale wind got up in the street, and the loose front page of a tabloid newspaper tried to stand upright: it was dragged a short way along the cobbles towards me, showing a headline about serial murders, before it was sucked into the backwash of a waste lorry that jolted across the intersection with men hanging off its tail.

Once I was outside I didn’t remember much about what I’d been doing in the slaughterhouse. It was like sleeping and waking: each evening, I knew I’d surfaced from a region as complex as the city of waking life, but I could no more retrieve my dreams than I could tell you what I’d soon be doing in the abattoir. That made me very good at my job.

The Market was a broad, kinked half-mile of cobbled thoroughfare as old as the city. Soon it would be jammed with stalls and the daytime folk carrying on their transactions, but for now it was all desertion and stone. Sodium lamps at intervals blotted the dark. Shadows wriggled behind sheets of vapour. Try the wrong alley or underpass and you could meet the Flâneur.

The Flâneur of Glory Part. You had to know that name by now. There had been four victims, so far.

I was halfway along the Market when I saw figures approaching. Between one spill of light and the next they turned from imperfections of my eyesight into a pair of shapes, male and female, with their arms linked. He was wrapped in a long coat, but her legs were bare. I relaxed, and my heart, always slow to catch up, unclutched and flurried in its cage. A man and a woman strolling in the Market by night only wanted to be left to themselves. I would pass on the far side of the road, I decided, to reassure them. They hadn’t seen me. She leant into him and whispered, then tugged at his arm, keen to get somewhere. He was dragging his feet in playful or real reluctance. I was hurt they hadn’t taken any notice of me, but I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead and kept walking.

When I looked again, they had stopped, and the man was holding the woman, taking all her weight. She had wrapped her arms around his neck, but they slipped open as I watched and he lowered her to the ground. Her limbs began to quiver, and he released her, sinking to his knees to cradle her head and shoulders. He lifted a gleaming hand. I saw the glint of the edge and the stain blooming over them both, black in the artificial light. Even at this distance, I could tell it had been a proficient stroke and that the outcome was beyond doubt.

My boots were drifting a mile down. I missed my footing on the kerb, and would have fallen except that I caught myself against the wall, raking the palm of my hand. The woman seemed listless, groping at his arms as he kept her head off the pavement. She grew still, and the man rose to his feet.

For what seemed a long time we faced each other across the Market. I did not breathe. The lamplight outlined him from behind, and his face was invisible, a dark mask with a pale halo. He stood as though now he was his victim’s protector. The knife was no longer in his hand. He did not move: he only watched and waited.

As I stood there, I felt future time crowding into the present moment. A kind of serenity came over me as I saw that by doing nothing I was agreeing to a burden of guilt that would not lessen for as long as I lived. It was all quite clear: how in this instant my sole chance to intervene was passing, and how bitterly, later, I would wish to turn time back and do it differently. One more breath and the city would sweep the waiting figure away from me. I was making a choice. Stale in the back of my throat, I could taste the self-condemnations to come over years and decades: why did you stand there? Why did you not do something good when you had the chance? I saw what a tiresome riddle it would become, why I had bowed my head in apology, turned and continued to my lodgings.