Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017. Jonathan Lyon
over, and found by it my jeans, but could not see anything else.
Kicking with one leg, paddling with one arm, I strove for the opposite bank, my lungs clenched as though stuffed with sackcloth. The bank was further than it ought to have been; possibly a current I couldn’t feel was resisting me – but my will was stronger than my muscles, and I achieved the shore. I climbed onto the bank in a crawl, wheezing, and sat to drag on my jeans and coat. But I couldn’t let myself pause here – so I crawled to the steps towards street level, spitting blood over my hands, my vision a whirlpool.
At the pavement, I tried to stand under a streetlight, but instead fell into a flowerbed. Its briars revived me – enough to claw forwards, with fists of soil, across and out onto the road. Cars cruised by with interior musics. I collapsed under the folds of my coat, looking up at clouds purpled by London’s light pollution.
As my body began to understand itself again, its adrenaline dwindled, but was replaced by a more exquisite thrill – of realisation.
The robbers could have guessed to search my socks and boxers – but Dawn’s antic mode this evening suggested she had betrayed me. Perhaps they had followed me from her doorstep. And so my suspicions about my whipping weren’t just paranoia – Dawn was arranging my injuries. Our game was real – I loved her more, for this.
And now it was my turn to play.
A car was approaching along the lane I lay in. And as I blacked out, I ejaculated.
I woke in a man’s arms.
‘No,’ I tried to say, but my teeth turned to brass and unscrewed me back into ultramarine.
I woke as a car door closed on my face. I couldn’t differentiate between words and textures. But I knew that a man was in the driver’s seat beside me.
‘Not to hospital,’ I said.
‘You have to.’
‘No… to 24 Orgrave Road, SE5… something. SE5.’
‘Is someone there?’
‘My… girlfriend,’ I managed, and blacked out again.
I woke in a man’s arms. He was holding me against a column of names.
‘Ravel,’ I told him.
The door buzzed open, he dragged me into the lift. As it rose, charcoal covered my eyes.
I woke in a woman’s arms.
‘What happened to him?’ she asked.
They carried me onto a sofa.
‘How much was the journey? Take it!’ she said.
His protestations dissolved into glue.
I woke as a woman pulled off my jeans. My wet coat was already gone.
‘Eva!’ I said.
‘What happened to you?’
‘I’m… cold.’
‘Not for much longer. Shit!’
She drew the jeans off over my feet and tucked me into a blanket.
‘You need to go to hospital.’
‘I need whisky.’
‘You need that treated.’
‘Then treat it.’
‘I’m not a nurse.’
‘Please?’
‘Ok, I probably have antiseptic, but you need more than that. Shit, you’re bleeding.’
‘Surface wounds. Decorative.’
‘Shit,’ she said, and left.
Eva returned with a tray of three tall glasses – one gold, one white, one green.
‘Drink all of these. You can’t talk to me till you’ve drunk all of them.’
I obeyed, shifting onto my un-stabbed side to drink first the milk, and then the whisky, and then the juice.
‘What was in that?’ I asked, tipping the last glass’s leftover algae along its side.
‘Protein shake with spinach.’
‘I’ve never felt so virtuous.’ I sat up a little.
‘Get back down.’ She took away the tray and lifted up the blanket to apply antiseptic to my cuts. ‘Turn over.’
I did so and she yelped. ‘Shit, were you whipped? You’ve been stabbed. What the fuck?’
‘I went swimming,’ I said, warming to the attention of her hands.
‘The taxi guy said you’d been in a canal?’
‘I went swimming,’ I said again.
‘Who did this?’
‘A blue-ringed octopus.’
She sighed in irritation. ‘So you were attacked and thrown into a canal. Why? And why did you come to me?’
‘You were the first person who came to mind. I remembered your address from last night. Were you not expecting me?’
‘I’m supposed to hate you. Did you forget that when you drowned?’
‘Do you hate me?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe not. This afternoon I was… angry.’
‘I remember.’
‘Your eye is so fucked up.’ She squeezed more ointment onto her fingers.
‘Is that Savlon?’ I smiled.
‘What? Yeah. Why’s that funny?’
‘Nothing. It’s a good parallel.’
‘With what?’
‘Nothing.’
She sighed. ‘I was crying all afternoon.’
‘Same.’
‘I don’t think you’ve cried for centuries.’
‘My body cries in other ways.’
‘I can see that. But why would you come to me?’
‘I like you.’
Her hand twitched to her face, unsure of its response. In the shadows behind her I saw the outline of the taxi that had taken me here – and this shadow changed into a coach from a fairy tale – and then into a pumpkin – and then into a hearse – and I imagined myself inside the hearse, driving across a moor in the middle of England at night – and the moon was looming over me like a mother offering her breast to a child – and we sank.
‘I threw out Francis’ clothes,’ she said eventually. ‘I hate him. He lied to me. But I don’t know what to think about you. You didn’t actually lie to me. Or even if you did… yesterday, you were…’
‘I like you,’ I said again. ‘I came back with you yesterday because I wanted to come back with you. Why does everything have to have an agenda?’
I thought of how slowly yesterday she’d pulled off my trousers and kissed the inside of my thighs – and of how, later, a helicopter had passed overhead and she’d woken and told me she was burying herself with her own hands and I’d said I was cutting open her stomach and pulling out a snail-coloured snake and taking it