Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017. Jonathan Lyon
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.
‘Life is about to happen to us babyboyyy
Ring me cunt
This is yr mother btw
Luvvvv u’
These texts were from an unknown number, which I saved in my contacts as ‘Dawn, Mother Errant’ before ringing back.
‘You fucking done yet?’ she shouted. ‘I told you he was easy. He was easy weren’t he? I’m coming where you are. Wait – where the fuck are you again? You’re at the Waire, yeah?’
‘What? Yeah. How are you coming to me? Are you drunk?’
‘Shut up. I’m amazing,’ she laughed. ‘I’m a woman of the world again. I’m a fucking miracle! I told you I still have my ways, don’t I? I’m a goddess! Give me your perjury!’
‘Perjury? What you talking about? Are you in a car?’
‘Perjury, homage, whatever it’s called. Gifts for goddesses. You know what I mean. And fuck yeah I’m in a car. The fastest car in the Milky Way, sweetheart, you’ve got a chauffeur today. I’m nearly there so don’t move. Don’t you move! You can’t run off from me now anyway. It’s got the worst art you ever seen, don’t it? I told you.’
‘You mean like a religious offering?’ I asked, trying to address the first of her non-sequiturs.
The lobby I was passing through was indeed decorated with bland attempts at pop art, which, despite their garish colours, somehow all seemed beige.
‘No it’s a fancier word than that, you fuckwit. One of your posh words. I only want your poshest words. The fanciest fucking words you’ve got, for the fanciest woman you know.’
‘A libation?’
‘That’s the fucking one, beautiful!’ she said. ‘You’re a gorgeous boy! Libation, invective, perjury – you know the words – only give me the good shit now.’
‘How did you get a car?’
‘No spoilers, bitch, you’re waiting for me. Don’t move!’ She hung up.
I stepped onto the pavement. Kensington was tensing itself for rush hour. Bicycles flirted past wing-mirrors towards the calmer cobbled side streets. The clouds above us were tensed too, as if plotting violence against the autumn.
London seemed to grow out of its weather, not out of the ground – the mood came first and then the body – and this mood followed the whims of the surrounding sea, which was as changeable as a child – and had a child’s fury and a child’s persistence.
In a precaution I’d been taught by Dawn, I redistributed the stack of fifties across my two pockets, my boxers-briefs, and my right sock. The pain dizzied me pleasantly. And as I replaced my shoe, a white car drove up beside me – blasting one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos through an open window.
‘Oi, your highness!’ Dawn shouted. ‘Get the fuck in, we’re going to the guillotine!’
‘Have you had your hair done?’ I asked, getting in.
It had been dyed the colour of honeycomb, and her skin seemed to have been pulled tighter over her face too – so that it was sharp and handsome in an untrusting way. She wore a black leather jacket over a black lace dress, on a petite frame thinned by years of addiction.
‘I done everything. I look like a hundred years younger, don’t I? I don’t even remember what age is after thirty-four. I shaved my legs above the knee. I’m even wearing heels.’
‘You’re not,’ I said, and tried to bend to see her feet under the dashboard, but she pushed my head away.
‘Maybe I’m not wearing heels, you cheeky shit, you’re not allowed to check. A woman is wearing heels if she tells you she’s wearing heels. Wait, what’s wrong with you?’
‘Just drive.’
‘You’re flinching, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you sit right? What he do?’
‘What? Nothing, it was fine.’