I took pleasure in manipulating for its own sake – and partly because it was the role Dawn wanted me to play anyway – as it let her be a more caring, protective mother to me, and so let her atone for failing her other son, from whom she was estranged.
She turned off the radio and gripped my wrist.
‘You’re telling me this fucking minute what just happened up there.’
‘I’m fine. He. I’m fine.’
Still gripping my wrist, she unzipped my tracksuit top. I twitched at her touch. She pulled the jacket over my shoulder, exposing the edge of a welt from the tongue of the belt.
‘What the fuck?’ She pushed me forwards to pull it down further, exposing the rest of his lashes.
I pretended to shiver, carefully, so as not to overplay it – and didn’t reply. I wanted her mind to spread multiple narratives across my silence.
‘Why’d he do this? That was never his game.’
‘It’s his game now,’ I said, attempting a half-laugh.
‘Fuck, babe, how’d I let this happen?’
But there was something so insincere about the way she said this that I began to wonder whether she was role-playing too. Dawn was as clever and as bored as me, after all – her other son refused to see her for a reason. Maybe she’d known her client would whip me, and wanted him to. He had acted as though it had been pre-arranged. Maybe she was playing a new game with me, then, a violent game – born of love and cruelty and love of cruelty, and love of games themselves – and in it we had to hurt each other, using people as our instruments. Or maybe I was being paranoid.
‘This had nothing to do with you, it’s not about you,’ I said, now hopeful that the opposite of this was true.
‘You need Savlon. It’s ok I’ve got Savlon in my bag – mummy can get you some painkillers – oh shit, you need some painkilling, I was wondering why you weren’t sitting right – look at you!’ There was no sympathy in her voice. ‘This is fucked up. How was you even standing out there? Who uses the belt end? You’re bleeding! Fuck. Lean over, let me fix this.’
‘Can we drive somewhere else first?’
‘No, lean over.’
She reached behind her seat for her handbag, rummaged awhile, and found the antiseptic cream. Her fingers drew its ointment across my wounds with a tenderness that seemed almost admiring of – or excited by – the violence she’d arranged for me.
‘Fuck men, fuck men, fuck men like that,’ she said, enjoying her own performance. ‘He better of given you extra for this. What the fuck? How much you get?’
‘Eight hundred.’
‘What? No! It was supposed to be a grand.’
‘No, it was supposed to be five hundred. Then he gave me a three hundred pound tip for this.’
‘Oh my god, baby, this is not how we start our new life. Life is about to happen to us, I’ve been telling you, we’ve got to be looking our best. Thank fuck he didn’t touch your beautiful face! You been crying?’
She kissed my shoulder. I shrugged her off and pulled my top back up. I wanted to believe she’d had me wounded on purpose. And if this was a game, then it was my turn to play.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Some painkilling would be good if we can get some though.’
‘Course we can darling, I’ve got you. I got you. We’re going to do something fun.’ Bored of her fake dismay, she’d become enthusiastic again. She jerked the car forward, away from the main road, towards the backstreets. ‘Mummy’s going to give you a driving lesson. We got to act like rich people now. So we got to drive where they drive. And I’ve got so much to say, you’ve been gone so fucking long.’
‘It’s been like ten days.’
‘Yeah and I made some changes. Cos I —’
There was a smack on the windscreen – we flinched. A bleeding lump rolled down the glass and slumped onto the bonnet. We peered forwards. It was an injured squirrel, perhaps fallen from a tree. It lay on its back, twitching, trying to right itself – as something black dived upon it: a crow as a big as a cat. The crow drove its beak into the squirrel’s skull. Dawn looked away. Between thrusts, the crow rotated its head to survey its surroundings – and eventually made eye contact with me. It knew it was being watched, but did not fear this audience. I smiled in encouragement. The crow hammered the squirrel into a mess of sinew, but ate nothing – seemingly intent only on the kill. And then it flew away.
‘What the fuck?’ Dawn said.
The squirrel’s innards rolled down the bonnet. She activated the windshield wipers, but dryly – smearing the blood in arcs across the glass before she worked out how to activate the wiper fluid – and the red was diluted towards orange. A strand of intestine got caught at the edge of the windshield. The carcass lay on the car like a wound in the steel itself – almost invitingly, like a portal you could put your hand through, into a future where muscle and metal were forgotten.
‘It’ll fall off when we drive,’ I said.
‘What the fuck? Is this what an omen is?’
I laughed. ‘It’s raining squirrels, that means fertility.’
‘I fucking hope not. I don’t need more sons.’
As we drove onward, the squirrel flopped slowly towards us, and then, with a last splatter, slid off the side onto the road.
‘What changes were you talking about?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘What were the changes you were going to tell me about?’
‘Oh yeah, fuck. No, no, no – we need to reset the mood first. I’m definitely not staying driving after that omen of yours.’
‘How was that my omen?’
‘It weren’t fucking raining dead squirrels till you got in here, was it? I’m marked for death now. Fuck. I’m getting the champagne out and you’re getting in my seat.’
She parked beside a terrace of improbably white five-storey houses.
‘You’ll be a natural babe,’ she said. ‘It’s automatic, it’s easy. Just pretend you are Kensington, ok?’
She got out and came round to my side. I let her lead me back past the squirrel streaks to the driver’s seat. But before I’d sat down, she began pointing out various buttons and levers, too quickly for a novice to remember. I wasn’t, however, quite a novice – five years ago, I’d spent two weeks sleeping in a car with a girl on a tobacco-manufacturing plant, and she’d taught me how to drive. Naturally, I wasn’t going to tell Dawn this – I needed her to believe that she was mothering me and, too, I needed to further the illusion I fed to her of myself as a prodigy, capable of adapting to any situation with astonishing rapidity.
So I turned the key, released the handbrake, and immediately lurched into the bumper of the car in front of us, setting off its alarm. Dawn shrieked and slapped me. I stamped the car to a stop, shaking, my confidence gone.
‘Let me get in my seat first you fucking psychopath!’ She slammed my door shut and sprinted to the passenger side. ‘The fuck is wrong with you? Get in reverse! Quick! Drive!’
I obeyed, trying to adapt to the vehicle’s rhythms, my mind narrowed, and backed out into the street – and then pushed the stick into ‘D’ and accelerated forward. Ashamed that I’d failed to maintain my performance, my cheeks flushed – and a taste like over-sweet strawberry jam came over my gums. I hadn’t been the master illusionist, I’d been clumsy. I was ashamed of feeling ashamed – of still having a pride that could be pricked. I tried to cough the taste away.
She reached behind my seat for her bag and retrieved