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  Cutaways

  When Nona first got sick, Pepe took an extra job to support them. He couldn’t understand it, how she could seem fine one day then gradually begin to look like a stranger, with bags under her sunken eyes, her hair turning completely white and her dramatic weight loss. He was so overcome with fear and worry at the time he found himself reaching for the glass surfaces that had captured reflections of the old Nona, wanting to ask her for guidance, to stay a little longer before some other greedy, grabbing hand came for her, infiltrating the surface.

  At twenty-five Pepe was cleaning offices for a living. He had attempted to get work other people would label as more decent but something about him unsettled employers. And he often answered questions too honestly.

  Cleaning offices was an easy job. He had spotted the advert in a small, white box at the back of the Evening Standard: Onin Cleaning. Reliable cleaners wanted, £6.00 per hour! Regular work guaranteed!

  He had ripped the page out and rung the number. A week later, he had started work. The owner, a chubby, amicable Moroccan called Amal hadn’t even asked for references. Pepe had liked the solitary nature of it at first, the way you could slip through the cracks, below people’s eyeline. He cleaned offices all over the city, often travelling into Canary Wharf, London’s financial hub, on red buses coughing black smoke into the lungs of lost silhouettes, surrounded by glass skyscrapers winking mockingly at poorer areas just a stone’s throw away.

  Nona teased him sometimes, in that raspy voice of hers, “All this work! You need to find a nice girl, someone you can test those crazy recipes of yours on. Yes, someone who likes to eat with a big appetite for life, who thinks home is wherever you are.”

  He didn’t bother to tell her that he had his eye on someone, someone he had never met and was unlikely to meet, except when he considered the possibilities in a darkened office, emptying the bins, wiping tables down, clearing snack wrappers from drawers.

  In the Semtec Corporation building on the third floor, there was one particular desk he was drawn to. It sat on the open plan office boasting wide windows and a big skylight. He was convinced the gutted consciences of the city were ghosts pressing their mouths against the keyholes. The desk was grey and L-shaped. On it a picture of a walnut-skinned black woman wearing a blue flower pinned into her locks always caught his attention. It was a side profile shot and for some reason it made her seem more intriguing, like having half a map in your hands. Her head was thrown back, lips stretched in a knowing smile.

  He took to playing a Where’s Wally-like game, only with her replacing Wally in the starring role, becoming increasingly fascinated by the prospect of finding her in imagined scenarios. He saw her tucked inside a bull fighting audience, watching the bull run out of the pen into her sly smile. She was in a stream of runners at the London Marathon, sandwiched between a Pavarotti lookalike and a man wearing a TV costume. At a Staff Benda Billili concert, she was hidden inside the ceiling of the dark stage, occasionally bobbing her head down out of the shadows. Each time Pepe was always somewhere in the shot too; riding on the bull towards her, holding ice water on the sidelines at the marathon. On stage he was an extra member of the band, playing drums frenetically while she bobbed her head down into the beat.

  Once he masturbated on the picture frame. She opened her plush mouth even wider when he came. Afterwards, he wiped the frame with trembling hands, feeling both relieved and pathetic. He looked up to the skylight and the foggy consciences had semen on their hands.

  For a few months, he continued cultivating their fantasy life but one dank, damp evening he arrived to find her picture gone. That particular employee at Semtec had moved on. And he’d taken their girlfriend away with him.

  He queried around for work, heard one of the meat shops in the area were looking for an extra worker.

  “Are you squeamish? Can you chop meat properly?” Hanif, the butcher with the artificial leg, asked.

  It was after 7pm, staff and the last few customers had left. The shop, a long, narrow space with a sloping, white ceiling and a red linoleum floor, seemed eerily empty. A row of display fridges ran all the way down, filled to the brim with assortments of meat and fish. More meat dangled from hooks attached to the ceiling. Behind the fridges, large wooden tables marked by blood and bones sat against a tiled wall designed as a choppy, blue sea. To the left, a lengthy, rectangular mirror hung on the wall.

  “I’m not,” Pepe answered. “I’m probably as capable as the average person at cutting meat, meaning not very good.” He smiled, his eyes lingered on the leg jutting through Hanif’s trouser, slightly smaller than the other leg. After a few months cleaning, Pepe had grown restless; it was time to move on. Nona was getting worse, one kidney had failed. She was on the NHS waiting list for a transplant but God only knew how long that would take. He needed to save money. He started cabbing at nights.

  Hanif waved a bloody meat cleaver, used it to nudge some chopped lamb shoulder into a carrier bag. “The pace here is crazy. If you can’t keep up, I’ll have to let you go.”

  “Come on, I’ll make you aloo gobi if you interview me!”

  “You’re a funny one my friend!” Hanif responded. “Offering to cook for me in exchange for an interview.”

  Pepe looked at the ceiling of dangling meat, threatening to swing into points of the conversation. He liked Hanif. He liked the sea in the wall that carried the low hum of fridges.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Hanif said, snapping him out his reverie.

  “What am I thinking?” Pepe asked, keen to hear his fate one way or the other.

  Hanif laughed. “My friend, you want to know what happened to my leg.”

  Working at Hanif’s, Pepe learned how to gut chickens and clean fish properly. He mastered the skill of chopping and bagging meat in no more than two minutes. Randomly, he picked up lip reading and was able to discern an order through the din from the opposite end of the room. Sometimes, after customers left he saw their mouths rounding on words against the shop window. Words like cow leg, gizzard, goat soup. At night, he dreamt of meat resting on blue margins and chickens calmly still losing their heads, when the knife slashed their throats.

  Pepe enjoyed the banter of the men behind the counter. He grew used to the sound of cleavers hitting tables, the cash register ringing, the smell of meat in the air and small bloodstains on money notes. His recipes were tested on the team; vegetable biriyani, pumpkin pie, winter warming mutton soup.

  He and Hanif grew closer; chatting over drinks at the pub, watching the world pass by during breaks from the green enclave tucked behind the shop. One day, Hanif finally told him how he had lost his leg.

  “I was holidaying in Egypt. I got bitten by mosquitoes when I went in the sea then got stung by a jellyfish. I was so sick; I thought I would die, man. My leg turned gangrenous. They had to cut it off.”

  “Shit, that’s horrible.”

  “Was a good holiday before I got stung and lost that leg.”

  A moment of silence passed.

  “My grandmother is really sick. I think I’m going to give her my kidney.”

  “You’re a good son.”

  “Maybe. What would you do in my place?”

  “I would do the same my friend, do whatever it takes.”

  They sat silently for a bit, two birds leaning against a city wall with wires in their mouths.

  After three months, a new meat shop opened across the street. It was bigger, busier and had better deals. Hanif began losing customers. Letting a couple of workers go wasn’t an easy decision. He started forgetting orders minutes after they were made and refused to answer his mobile phone constantly vibrating in his pocket. He kept his meat cleaver close by, rubbing it on his leg, tapping it against the tables distractedly.

  Eventually, he confided in Pepe: “I owed the bank a lot of money. I borrowed from some dangerous people to pay them off, but it was a trap. I’m in deep shit and the interest keeps growing rapidly.”

  Pe
pe imagined him waving that cleaver in his sleep, carving paths of escape with its wide, glimmering blade.

  One blustery morning after his week off, Pepe arrived for a shift at the shop. It was 8.30am. The shutters were only half up. He walked round the back. The window had been left half-open too as though Hanif had been in two minds about something. He climbed in, moved past the freezer door and into the shop floor. Silence greeted him. Normally at this time, Hanif would be filling the fridges. The shop was virtually empty; most of the stock had been cleared out. Pepe’s heart rate increased. Only the fish in the fridge facing the display window still harboured night in their eyes. He headed back to the freezer door and opened it: it was also gutted except a few dangling chickens.

  He grabbed his phone from his pocket, nearly dropping it, and rang Hanif. The number had been disconnected. Edging forward, he bit back a groan, shivering slightly. Hanif had cleared out, closed up shop. He was still owed a month’s wage. He needed that money. How could he have taken off like that without telling him, without warning? He knew things had been rough, but he felt betrayed. He felt sad and alone.

  Pepe leaned against the wall. The cold meats hung from the ceiling in a haphazard circle. The room swayed. He could hear the sound of the streets coming to life. He noticed the chickens dangling had purple bruises on their bodies. As the bruises spread, the chickens lifted their heads. Pepe stood again in shock. One by one, the chickens leapt off their hooks and stumbled towards him, bloodied rims around their necks. They placed their beaks inside his head and began to chatter. Pepe came up with a plan. Nona needed a kidney transplant urgently. He would give her his. He was sure he’d be a match. They couldn’t hang around hoping to be bumped up the waiting list anymore. They would do it privately. He’d heard of such operations happening in other countries. He’d fly Nona out to India or somewhere else and get it sorted.

  The house now harboured a funny, stale smell and Nona struggled to breathe. He read to her at nights from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, lifting his head occasionally from the page, watching the faint smile on her face, the light shrinking in her eyes.

  He hit every major bank asking for a loan. “It’s urgent, please. I’m not sure what else to do.” The responses were variations of the same answer:

  “I’m afraid you don’t qualify for that kind of loan.”

  “Your credit rating is really poor.”

  “Without any steady income the bank can’t take that risk, cabbing at nights isn’t enough.”

  “But this is an emergency,” he wailed.

  “I’m sorry, sir, we can’t help you. Good luck!”

  A week later, Nona passed. He experienced a pain in his side so sharp, he had to stay in bed. He drank himself to sleep. In the morning, he woke with a fury that consumed his whole body. He’d tried to do the right thing but where had that gotten him? He remembered the chickens talking to him in Hanif’s freezer and the costume up in the attic, waiting to speak its own language.

  A month passed, and Pepe lost his ability to vanish. The robberies stopped. He was ill. He shuffled around the house, feeling hollow and thin. He could barely keep anything down. Looking in the mirror, his reflection was missing. He began to search round the house for it. Something was changing within him that he couldn’t explain. He felt like his organs were failing. He was sure of it. Something was happening to his kidneys, he’d seen it in the pub weeks back. They were shrinking inside him, reappearing in the hands of those men in the pub who rubbed it over their mouths.

  One morning in November Pepe visited a Barclays bank as a customer, without his chicken suit persona. He stood in the queue running over his options. Like Nona, he would be left waiting to die. He could feel himself getting sicker by the day. There would be nobody to look after him. Instead he’d have to sit in his lonely house surrounded by things he couldn’t take with him to the other side, the stench of illness in the air, dreaming of headier times when he’d had the courage to leave his mark, longing for the embrace of a lover. He’d think about that pretty woman he loved to place around the city and how he’d hoped to run into her one day randomly, just like that.

  He thought of his chicken costume in a casket slowly filling with soil and began to cry quietly. An Asian customer service woman in a neat uniform approached him. He noticed her long, black hair brushed her shoulders and her clean fingernails.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Pepe opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. Instead, choking sounds emerged and a small, yellow wing fell out, landing on her left shoe. They stared as it slid further down her shoe. As he pulled the gun from his pocket, a piece of paper dropped out. The woman gasped, stepping back. The queue scattered. Pepe checked the security cameras were on before facing her again. He placed the nozzle in his mouth and fired. The shot rang loudly. The air left the room. As Pepe’s body fell, people dived for cover, terrified.

  When the police arrived, they found the customer service assistant crying over Pepe’s lifeless body, holding a yellow wing in one hand and a piece of paper with a recipe in the other, entitled Dia De Los Muertos Queso Fundido.

  Footer

  She wanted her feet fucked. She wanted the soles kissed, arches traced, toes glistening with saliva. She knew she had good feet, beautiful in fact. Free of corns, blisters, scars and all those horrible afflictions women experienced from years of squeezing worn feet into heels. An old lover had told her so in bed one day. He’d held her shapely size 6’s in his hands as if they were pieces of art, softened them with his breath. “Your feet are amazing,” he had said, visibly dribbling. “They’re little women, little Botticelli Venuses.” She had succumbed to the feeling of being worshipped, to a delicious, deviant unspooling attached to a man’s tongue flicking between her toes. That was how it had begun.

  She placed the ad on Craigslist, listing the things she wanted. She imagined her golden, stiletto heel pinning down a man’s lip and her feet curled in anticipation. Loneliness watched from her sky blue Ikea sofa. It was three months old, had a green head, blank human eyes and a crocodile’s tail. Its body was mushy, lacked any real definition and looked as if it would sink into itself. Three months ago it had accosted her on the escalator at London Bridge and now it refused to leave her flat.

  A few days later, she checked her email. She was inundated with responses to her ad.

  Oh God, let me smell your feet, CHARLES KING P wrote. Keep them smelly, wear sheer tights and rub them on my face.

  I want to fit half your foot in my mouth, make me choke on it! I love the picture. You have pretty, brown feet, from ZICO 99.

  Will you kick me in the balls? They’ll turn the same colour as your dark, purple nail polish, from AMPERSAND MAN.

  All you have to do is let me pleasure your feet. If you like, you can chain me like a dog and I’ll lick them from my pathetic corner while they’re propped up looking down on me. You deserve it, from MARTIN P.

  One by one, she read their requests. Those men were like her, beautiful, defective bottles standing on a ledge. Loneliness moved towards the large living room window as she read. Wagging its tail, it watched the jagged light filtering through. She threw an empty bottle of Moscato at it. It dodged, surprisingly deft, then shrank back and chewed on bits of broken glass. It was its second meal of the day.

  She worked for 44668, a mobile text and answer service. Her job was to answer questions on anything and everything. What’s the rarest orchid? Do dogs dream? Will swallowing a teaspoon harm you? Can you die laughing? Between responses, she researched on the net or cut out pictures from old magazines to stick them on her collage board. Once or twice a week, she polished her feet and oiled them, admiring the sheen they took, as if under the soft focus light of a camera.

  She met the first guy, ZACHARY LIKES TO DANCE, in the evening at an empty park in Holloway. They convened in the play area. She laughed internally since he seemed the opposite of his moniker: gangly, awkward and sweet. He smelled of cigarettes and had a bald patch
. His long, tapered, organ player’s fingers trembled slightly.’ The left sleeve of his black, woolly coat was frayed. She had the urge to tug that thread to the street, into a cluster of people and leave it lying there like a dead weed. Instead, she asked if she could draw on a part of his body.

  “That’s a strange request,” he said.

  “No stranger than what we’re about to do,” she retorted.

  He agreed. She fished out her blue biro and began to draw a blueprint on his bald patch of a place that had no name.

  Afterwards, he buried his nostrils in her sweaty feet and inhaled. He grinned, hot breath warming her toes. He came up and she continued sketching.

  “That feels oddly soothing,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered. “These lines need to come out.”

  Later, beneath the shiny slide that looked like an aluminium slug in the darkening light, he took her stockings off gently, kissing the birthmark on her inner thigh. He kneaded her feet, held them to his face, licking the day’s trail. He told her that the year before he’d had a diving accident in Turin. He’d smacked his head against the side of the pool. Floating in the water, he’d watched his blood curl into a ribbon. And the last thing he’d thought of before everything went dark was that he needed to reach for it to tie that ribbon of blood around something dodging him in the water.

  He ran his fingers over her soles and whispered against them, “If I could eat your feet, I would.” She felt high, as though sitting on a folded edge of paper in the sky, legs dangling over. The park became acres of green with her legs planted in the soil, multiple versions of her feet bending in the breeze.